The German Room

by Carla Maliandi

  Miguel Javier gets up really early and spends all day on campus so we hardly ever cross paths. I wait three days and on the third day I’m still late. I don’t know how to ask for a pregnancy test in German. I ask Shanice to help me. She listens attentively and treats it as a secret mission that she has to carry out to perfection.

  A little while later she’s in my bedroom holding out a box she bought at the pharmacy. We read the instructions in three languages: pee in the little cup, place the little stick inside, wait three minutes, if only one line appears it’s negative, if two appear, it’s positive. Okay, that’s simple. I thank Shanice but she doesn’t leave. She stands there looking at me, waiting for me to go into the bathroom and announce the results. I gather my courage and ask her to leave me alone. She tells me no, that she’s not going to leave me alone at a time like this. She stands firm like a Japanese soldier and I feel indebted to her and too tired to explain anything. I take the test into the bathroom. I follow all the instructions: I pee in the little cup, I set it on the floor and put the little stick in it. I wait the three minutes it says on the box. I try to distract myself by looking in the mirror. My face is more and more like my mother’s every day. She was pregnant with me when they arrived in this city and didn’t know it. Did they celebrate when they found out? Did my dad go out to buy bread, sausages, a bottle of wine? Did they toast? Did they stay up all night making plans, call their families right away to give them the news? Did they laugh?

  I squat down to get a closer look at what I just saw standing up. Two bold, well defined lines. I turn the stick over, I shake it, I look at it again and the two lines are still there. I wash my hands and leave the bathroom. Shanice is sitting on the edge of my bed and she looks up expectantly. I tell her the truth: ‘It’s positive, I have to think about what I’m going to do.’ And I make two urgent requests: ‘Please go and please don’t tell anyone.’ Shanice hugs me before leaving me alone. I lock the door behind her and pace across the room a few times. Then I sit on the bed. I open a packet of cookies and an apple juice that I bought that afternoon. The juice is delicious and I feel all my muscles give way, my chest feels hollow and my jaw trembles. I bury my head in the pillow and sob until I fall asleep.

  FIVE

  I

  The night before our big trip back to Buenos Aires, the night that our house on Keplerstrasse filled up with philosophers and I looked at the sky identifying constellations, Mario cried in the kitchen. I found him washing the dishes when all the guests had left and my parents were finishing packing suitcases and boxes with clothes, books, and some of the few belongings we’d cherished during those years in Germany. I stood silently watching him as the running water hid the sound of his sobs. When he saw me standing there he dried his hands and face with a tea towel, lit a cigarette and asked me if I was going to write to him when I got to Buenos Aires. Every day, I promised even though I only knew how to write my name and a few random words. We hugged each other tight. Thirty years passed between that hug and the next one. In the beginning Mario would send me postcards of castles with made up stories written on the back. I eagerly awaited those letters, which were also the first texts I learned to read. In my imagination, after our departure he’d gone to live in one of those castles and one day I would visit him and we would get married and be very happy. Now I suppose that when we moved out of the house on Keplerstrasse Mario must have gone to live in a residence like this one. What was his life like until he became Herr Professor? Did he have boyfriends? And that beautiful Turkish man, what’s their relationship? Why am I scared to ask him?

  He’s going with me to see the doctor tomorrow. Once again I’ll have to go through all that: the hospital, the anxious wait, the latex gloves, the unsolicited recommendations. I wish I didn’t have to.

  II

  I’m awoken by knocking at my door. It’s daylight and evidently Shanice’s alarm clock didn’t work this morning. I open the door in my nightdress, Frau Wittmann is standing in front of me with wide eyes saying that Herr Professor has been waiting for me downstairs for a long time. I’d like to run away, jump out the window, or hide under the bed and go back to sleep. I thank Frau Wittmann, apologise for having made her come upstairs, and tell her I’ll be down right away.

  Mario is reading the newspaper as he waits for me in the dining hall. At the table next to his Miguel Javier is having coffee with scrambled eggs and toast spread with Nutella. My stomach turns and for the first time since I arrived I skip breakfast. I greet Mario and the Tucumano comes over to us.

  ‘Where are you two going so early?’

  ‘To the doctor.’

  ‘Then I’ll come with you.’

  ‘That’s not necessary, Miguel, thanks.’

  ‘Yes, it is necessary, or did you forget that the doctor is expecting to see me too?’

  The Tucumano likes contradicting me and he loves pretending he’s my husband in front of the doctor. He’s so enthusiastic that I give in and tell him he can come too. He wolfs down his last bite of toast, puts on his jacket and beats us to the door. When we step outside the cold air hits the three of us in the face. ‘Autumn has arrived,’ says Mario and we walk silently towards the hospital.

  They’ll only let me into the doctor’s office with one other person. The decision is difficult, my two friends look at me expectantly. I think about it for a few seconds and tell them that I’m going to go alone. They nod their heads and seem to approve. I leave them there, sitting in the waiting room as the doctor checks me out in the examination room. Everything’s fine.

  ‘Want to hear your baby’s heartbeat?’

  ‘Right now?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course, now,’ he answers surprised.

  I’d like to tell him not now, another time would be better, because I’m distracted and I’m not going to react the way I’m supposed to. There’s no way I can explain this to the doctor, and much less in German.

  ‘Alright,’ I say.

  And I begin to hear some little thumping noises that sound like the beat of a song, a song that contains all the melodies in the world within it.

  I’d like to keep listening to that heartbeat the rest of the day but the doctor has already gone back to his desk. On a prescription pad he writes down the names of some vitamins and says goodbye until next month.

  In my brief absence Mario and Miguel Javier have been talking. I can tell because when I return it’s obvious they’ve got comfortable with each other. Mario is telling him about his favourite cousin who was from Tucumán. Miguel Javier can’t believe that Mario hasn’t been back to Argentina since 1977.

  ‘Maybe someday I’ll get up the nerve,’ says Mario with a sad smile. ‘Until now I’ve never wanted to.’

  The Tucumano looks at him sympathetically. I’m in a very good mood and I propose we leave the hospital and continue our morning stroll.

  III

  We climb up to the Philosophers’ Walk, a footpath built in the early nineteenth century that climbs two hundred metres up a hillside. From there we have a beautiful view of the city, the castle and the river. It’s been a long time since I felt so happy. The autumn air is soothing. We sit on a bench beside the footpath. Mario tells us that it is named in honour of the many writers and philosophers who came to this spot for inspiration. He tells us that Goethe thought up his first ideas for Faust here, that this same spot inspired Hegel as he contemplated dialectics, that Schumann composed his Symphonic Etudes sitting on one of these benches looking at the Neckar. The Tucumano says that he’ll come up here when he has to write his thesis, to see if he can think of something ingenious that will make the Germans rename the path the ‘Tucumán Economist’s Walk.’ The joke isn’t funny but Mario and I smile because everything is happy right now.

  The three of us fall silent for a moment, drinking in the cool air, each thinking who knows what until Mario looks at his watch and says he has to go. He says goodbye and
walks slowly back down towards the city. His body from behind, tall and gangly, looks like it’s been part of this landscape forever.

  The Tucumano and I are left alone. Suddenly I remember Marta Paula, our phone conversation, her promise to consult a psychic about my pregnancy, and I realise that Miguel Javier has no idea about any of this, that I still haven’t told him. His sister’s words echo in my memory: Don’t tell him about Feli, he doesn’t believe in anything.

  ‘I forgot to tell you that your sister called me at the residence the other day.’

  ‘Marta Paula? Why?’

  ‘To thank me for the shoes.’

  ‘Just for that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she didn’t say anything else?’

  I can’t lie to the Tucumano, my face gives me away. Also I’m dying of curiosity to hear what he knows about this Feli character.

  ‘She told me they were going to consult with a psychic to ask about my pregnancy, about who the father might be.’

  Miguel Javier looks at me very seriously. Until just a moment ago I thought it would be fun to talk about this but now I can see that the conversation isn’t going to end well.

  ‘Did she tell you the name of the psychic? Did she say Feli?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Son of a thousand bitches. Talk about idiotic… She really said Feli?’

  ‘Yes. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. Feli is not a good person, Feli… is a horrible woman. That’s what’s wrong. I’m not there and she’s getting into trouble is what’s wrong.’

  I tell him not to worry, that his sister is a grown woman and she knows what she’s doing.

  ‘She doesn’t have a clue! The next time she calls you hand me the phone and I’ll set her straight! Let’s go, let’s go or I’m going to be late for class.’

  We practically run down the hill. At the bottom Miguel Javier says goodbye without looking at me and I watch him disappear down the street leading to the university.

  IV

  I wander around for a while. I don’t want to be shut up inside the residence, the sky is a lead grey colour and it covers the city with a supernatural light. I think about the heartbeat I heard at the hospital, my baby’s heartbeat, the doctor called it. Bam, bam, bam, I hear with every step I take. How is it that I’m not terrified? How have I not gone running back to Buenos Aires? I walk several blocks, everything feels tight, my bra, my shoes, and I find myself laughing, I laugh at nothing, as if I were happy, as if I were outside myself.

  I come to a little square on the other side of the old bridge. Some kids are doing acrobatics on a yellow metal structure in the playground. Farther back I spot Joseph, wrapped in a dark trench coat, taking photos. When he sees me, he smiles with his wolf’s teeth and puts a hand over his heart. I wasn’t expecting to see him again, but when he comes over I realise how much I’d wanted to. He greets me with a hug, sits down next to me and shows me the pictures he took that afternoon: a glass skylight from below, Turkish women in the door of a shop smiling at the camera, tourists with shopping bags on the old bridge, the kids in front of us frozen in mid-air. They’re beautiful, I tell him. We’re sitting so close that anyone might think we’re a couple. The very idea makes me nervous. If Mario saw us here, the two of us here without him… But my concern is silly, this wasn’t planned. We’re here, and his leg brushes my knee as I look at the photos on his camera. I can’t think about anything apart from touching him. He talks about the great light he had that afternoon. I noticed it too and that’s why I’d continued wandering around. But I don’t say anything, I smile and look back at the images on the screen and I feel the heat of his body next to mine. Now he invites me to have coffee at his house. Did he say his house?

  ‘It’s kind of cold out here,’ he says.

  It’s six o’clock and it’s already getting dark. The kids who just now were playing on the bars walk away holding their parents’ hands, wrapped in colourful puffy coats.

  ‘Maybe another day, I should go back to the residence now.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow.’

  I give him back his camera. I zip my jacket up to my chin. Joseph asks if he can take a photo of me. I think I must look terrible but I say yes. He points the lens at me and clicks three times. Then he takes a little notebook and a pen from his pocket and writes down an address.

  ‘Can I see the pictures?’ I ask him.

  He rips out the sheet he just wrote on and hands it to me.

  ‘It’s my address, you can see them tomorrow when you come round.’

  V

  Joseph’s apartment is on the top floor above his family’s shop, which sells Turkish spices. He has very little furniture: a mattress on the floor with pillows, an old couch, a desk, books piled up, an electric oven, photos spread out everywhere. The window frames a view of the old roofs of Heidelberg and the sky at this time of the afternoon is reddish. I spent all day deciding whether or not to come, I tried to distract myself by helping Frau Wittmann sort old magazines to throw away and talking to her about Shanice. After lunch I took a long bath, I washed my hair, spent a long time fixing it, put on the prettiest thing I could find.

  Now Joseph is making coffee and I’m letting myself sink into the couch as if I weren’t planning to get up until the next day.

  ‘How did you meet Mario?’

  I don’t know why I ask him this. I don’t want to talk about Mario. Not with him. I don’t want to think about the relationship they have or imagine them here together, naked, dressed, or in any state.

  ‘At the university, in my failed attempt to study philosophy,’ Joseph answers as he heats water and washes some mugs. I see him as if he were moving in slow motion, as if it were a sequence of still frames I want to have branded on my memory forever.

  ‘And you became friends there?’ I say and immediately regret asking such a stupid question.

  ‘Yes, Mario is an amazing person. Intelligent, generous, with a great sense of humour. I could spend days with him and never get bored.’

  Joseph smiles, he hands me coffee in one of the mugs he’s just washed and he stares at me. His black eyes are like tunnels that I want to crawl into, pass through, and face whatever’s on the other side.

  ‘You went to the doctor yesterday?’ he asks me, to break the silence.

  ‘Yes, Mario came with me.’

  Again I’m talking about Mario. I can’t believe it. I’d like to forget the way I saw them smiling at each other and be able to talk about him as if it were no big deal.

  Now Joseph shows me some photography books he was excited to receive this morning from New York. He sits next to me and together we turn the heavy pages, one by one. We flip past portraits of exaggeratedly expressive people, urban landscapes, interiors of public buildings. Joseph touches my face, he pushes back my hair and he kisses me on the mouth. I’m frozen, sunk into the couch, my heart races but I’m calm. Mario no longer figures in my thoughts. Joseph, still kissing me, begins taking my clothes off. Suddenly we’re both naked, intertwined. My body is beautiful in his hands and I wrap myself around him, as if he’s what I’d been missing all my life.

  We fuck all afternoon and then we fall asleep. When we wake up it’s night-time. Joseph gets up, puts on a wool sweater and looks for something to make for dinner. He fills a pot with water to make spaghetti and shows me some of the spices from his family’s shop. There are dozens of little jars filled with colourful condiments. I unscrew a lid and the smell is so strong it seeps into my brain. I recognise basil, cumin, bay leaf, maybe mustard. The rest are a mystery.

  Every once in a while Joseph pours me a bit of wine.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asks.

  ‘That this was the best day I’ve had since I got to Germany. And also that it’s the first time I’ve had sex s
ince I got pregnant.’

  Joseph smiles but he remains silent. I don’t know why I’m telling him this. It wasn’t necessary. It doesn’t matter. I watch him as he works in the kitchen. I want to ask him to stand still so I can determine the exact shape of his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his teeth. He puts plates on the table and he says to me:

  ‘Mario’s coming.’

  ‘Here? When?’

  ‘At nine.’

  I get dressed as fast as I can. Joseph tells me to stay, that dinner is almost ready. I don’t understand him. I don’t even hear him. I ask him if the door below is open, and I pray, as I walk down the stairs, that I won’t run into Mario. When I get to the street Joseph pokes his head out the window and shouts something to me in Turkish.

  ‘No te entiendo,’ I shout, and I get out of there as quickly as I can, virtually at a run.

  TWO

  I

  It’s raining in Heidelberg. It’s Saturday and the dining hall has become a meeting place for the students who’ve had their weekend outings ruined. After an entire day without leaving my room I decide to go downstairs. Miguel Javier is playing chess with a bearded redhead. I’ve seen him before, I think he’s from some Eastern European country and they’re classmates at the university. I’m happy to see the Tucumano after so many days and I sit at the table next to theirs waiting for them to finish playing so I can talk to someone for a little while and shake off this feeling of being shut up. The Tucumano gives me a sidelong glance while remaining focused on the game. He moves one of his knights.