The German Room

by Carla Maliandi

  Miguel Javier is more excited than I am about the stuff I inherited. As we empty the boxes in my room he shouts out phrases such as: No way! That Jap had a lotta cash! I give him a scolding look, he apologises but then he says it makes him angry when rich people commit suicide, that he respects it but it makes him angry. I open the box of shoes and realise they’re all too small for me. I ask the Tucumano what size shoe Marta Paula wears. He tells me that he doesn’t remember but that he’s sure Shanice’s shoes will fit her and we decide to make a parcel to send to Tucumán.

  We fill up a box with the shoes and some of the clothes. Then we look through Shanice’s camera and phone. There are videos she made of herself cleaning her room, taking notes in class, buying shoes, walking up to the castle. In some she speaks Japanese, in others German, describing everything with an exaggerated enthusiasm. I don’t know if she was planning to send these videos to someone or if she simply liked to film herself. Most of them are boring and silly, but the video of the castle is different, it’s beautiful. Shanice goes up in the cable car, there are shots of several smiling tourists and then a view of the city below while she sings a Japanese song. It sounds childish but sad and she sings beautifully. I remember my walk up to the castle with the Tucumano and his prediction of my pregnancy, I also remember the times I went up in my childhood, they’re fuzzy, happy memories but they’re tinged with a melancholy. I wonder whether the day she made this video Shanice had already decided to kill herself. I watch her going into one of the castle courtyards, she films her shoes, very pretty blue ones that we’ve just put in the box for Marta Paula. Those shoes will soon walk the worn carpets of the Hotel Miami, the floor of Miguel Javier’s old house, the streets of their neighbourhood, which is called ‘Palmeras’. I read the address that the Tucumano writes on the box. Hotel Miami, Palm Trees neighbourhood. I wonder if Miguel Javier realises how ridiculous these place names are. Shanice films a ruined wall covered in ivy. The shot is very long, it lasts seventeen minutes, never moving from the wall. The Tucumano repeats: ‘the Japanese are mysterious, you can’t try to understand them.’

  As promised, Mrs Takahashi comes back to get me a few hours later for tea. She’s changed her clothes, and is now wearing a light-coloured dress, very different from the dark heavy suit she’d worn to the burial. I’m tired and would prefer to stay in and nap but I accept the invitation. We walk to Marktplatz, I show her the place where I had breakfast the day I arrived, I tell her about that first day, my long walk past the places from my childhood that I only barely remember now. Mrs Takahashi is interested in everything I tell her and she shows it by opening her almond eyes very wide and smiling at everything she thinks is nice. She interrupts me briefly to make comments on how beautiful the city is and how grateful she is to be somewhere new. She points to something on each corner and thinks everything is fantastic. Her attitude would be perfectly normal to someone who didn’t know she’d come here to bury her only daughter this morning. When we’re about to enter the café she asks me if we can go somewhere with more young people. I don’t understand her question and I have to ask her to repeat it several times. When I finally understand I offer to take her to the university cafeteria, which is full of students. She smiles widely and waves her arms exclaiming: ‘yes, yes, I want to go there!’ We take off in that direction.

  Mrs Takahashi is fascinated by the place. She orders herbal tea and pear cake for the two of us. We are surrounded by twentysomething students from all over the world. Some of them might’ve been Shanice’s classmates. Mrs Takahashi watches them with the teacup in her hand.

  ‘I’m turning sixty-two this year, can you believe it?’ she says.

  She really looks much younger. Her face has almost no lines and her eyes have a sparkle that seems excited and expectant. I don’t know what to say, I talk about tea, about the cake, about the delicious German pastries. She now stares at a black student, possibly Central American. She looks at him in a way that begins to make me uncomfortable and she tells me that he’s beautiful. I smile, nodding my head and I understand that, at least as far as she’s concerned, we’ve become friends and that things are going to keep getting stranger.

  ‘Do you think that the foreign students have more sex than the Germans?’ she asks.

  I remember the Albanian and our fleeting encounter. ‘I don’t know, I haven’t really noticed anything like that,’ I answer.

  Mrs Takahashi tells me that when she was pregnant with Shanice she felt sexual desires towards all men, it didn’t matter if they were ugly, or even if they were related to her. Mrs Takahashi laughs loudly. Then she lowers her voice and tells me she was always faithful to her husband and that she regrets it, that life is too short and sex is the best experience we can have. The black student is drinking coffee at the table across from ours with a group of young people who laugh and swap lecture notes, and from time to time he looks up and gives us brief glances. I wonder what Mr Takahashi is doing, if he’s able to get any rest, if he’s closed the blinds of his hotel room to be in the dark, if he’s crying. I tell Mrs Takahashi about Shanice’s videos, I ask her if she wants them, if she wants me to make her copies. I tell her that there’s a pretty video of her going up to the castle. She says that Shanice used to send her those videos and that she doesn’t need me to make her any copies. The black student stands up and leaves with his classmates. Mrs Takahashi follows him with her gaze and he turns his head for a second to look at her. She sighs, takes a sip of tea, and after a while she tells me that she wants to extend her stay in Heidelberg for a few weeks, that her husband has to return to his affairs in Tokyo but that she’s decided to stay. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ she asks me. I try to make something up but I can’t think of a good excuse.

  ‘Nothing special,’ I tell her.

  ‘I want to visit that castle,’ she says and then asks me to please show her the way. We agree that she’ll come by the residence for me in the morning.

  III

  My room is full of Shanice’s things, spread out across the floor and on the bed. I still don’t know how much it’s all worth but I’m glad to have a laptop again. I think I’ll sell one of the two cameras, the money could pay for the next month’s rent at the residence. I open Shanice’s computer, hundreds of documents pop up before my eyes, almost all of them in Japanese. There’s a folder of photos from her childhood, her father beside her in many of them. A beautiful and chubby-cheeked little Japanese girl posing at an amusement park, inside an ice cream parlour, a train station. Mr Takahashi, twenty years younger, is very handsome. What about his wife? Shanice’s mother doesn’t appear in any of the images.

  I should copy all these folders and clean out the hard drive before I start using it. With a new computer I could at least connect to Buenos Aires. I’d like to stay up a little longer but I’m overcome with exhaustion. Maybe it’s because of the pregnancy, I think. I fall asleep murmuring things I don’t understand.

  It’s raining. Mrs Takahashi hasn’t come. I finish breakfast in the dining hall and decide to go back to sleep. I remember Shanice’s computer, I was up till three in the morning last night sorting through her things. The activity silenced the nagging voice in my head that constantly asks: what are you going to do?

  I assume Mrs Takahashi has cancelled the outing because of the rain. Now that I have a laptop and I can get on the internet I should answer my e-mails. The very idea puts me in a bad mood. Back in Buenos Aires it was something I did every day, but here it’s different, here the time passes in a strange way and nothing is the same. How much longer will I be able to disappear from the internet too, from the lives of others? How much longer will the e-mails continue to pile up, their demands for explanations, their concern over things that I can’t even remember anymore? How much longer will I be able to put off going home? And what if everyone forgets me? A forgotten person is like a dead person, and no one wants a dead person to show up in the world of the living. Before
I know it Frau Wittmann is sitting at my table asking me for my proof of enrolment. Her voice shakes me out of my daze. I tell her that I’ll have it by this afternoon. I put on one of Shanice’s raincoats and walk towards the university in search of a solution.

  IV

  A tall blonde secretary greets me at the student services office. I explain that I’d like to enrol in a postgraduate seminar, preferably something related to literature or history or anything in the humanities. I know that my request is pretty absurd, that this is not the way things are done. The secretary stares at me for a moment, silent and impassive. I know that given my poor German my request must seem odd, and she’s trying to figure me out. She shows me applications, forms, academic timetables. She tries to be friendly but she’s resolute: the semester has already started and course offerings are closed for enrolment. I want to ask her if maybe there’s some kind of workshop, something extracurricular, but she’s already gone back to her work and isn’t looking at me. I feel dizzy. I go out in search of water and somewhere to sit. There’s a class in session next to the office I just left. The door is open so I go in and take one of the last empty seats. No one notices my presence. It’s a huge semi-circular room with wood panelling. I think I remember this place, the smell, I have the impression that I’ve been here before. The professor has a familiar accent. He speaks very good German but his Rs and the cadence of his sentences sound Argentinian. I ask the girl sitting in front of me what this course is called. ‘Latin American Ideologies,’ she tells me. And something that could only be classified as a miracle occurs. I recognise the professor. It’s Mario, my father’s old student who lived for a while at our house here in Heidelberg. He’d fled Argentina after they raided his house and he was here learning the language and finishing his degree. We’d go for ice cream in Marktplatz and I taught him to order the flavours in German. I went up to the castle with him several times and he always made up a new story to tell me on the way. There was one I liked a lot, I don’t remember it now, but I know it was about a princess named Whiteflower who’d baked a cake in the castle’s kitchen and the cake had grown and grown until it reached the ceiling and kept growing till it broke through the roof. That man standing there lecturing on some theory or other of Astrada is Mario, the nervous boy who bit his nails, who cried when he received letters from Buenos Aires, who whistled while he washed the dishes, who taught me how to peel an orange in a spiral. This awkward, slightly past-his-prime man, with thick glasses and a gravelly voice that everyone is listening to attentively, was my first friend.

  Mario wipes his glasses, puts them back on, looks at me again. I’ve just emerged from the crowd of students who are asking about exam dates and reading lists, said Hola Mario, and his face turned red. I imagine no one here calls him by his first name and that very few speak to him in Spanish. He smiles shyly, searching his memory, murmurs words and half-phrases. I think there’s no way he’ll recognise me after thirty years. Mario hugs me. Now I’m the one turning red, I can’t believe he remembers me. We laugh, we hug again. Some students come up, they call him Herr Professor and they talk about an article they have to read for the next class. He asks me to wait for him, says he can’t get over seeing me here, that it’s the nicest surprise he’s had in years.

  Mario invites me to his house. On the way he admits he only recognised me because I look so much like my mother and because a while back he looked me up on the internet and saw some photos of me. He lives alone in a fairly large apartment that he’s been renting for many years. We make some spaghetti with sauce and we don’t stop talking for a second. I tell him everything: I talk about my pregnancy, about how I’m not sure who the father is, about Shanice’s suicide, my Tucumán friend, Mrs Takahashi, my life in the student residence and the growing pressure from Frau Wittmann. Mario listens with an understanding that puts me at ease. After lunch he goes to find some boxes and starts to show me photos and letters from our old life in Heidelberg. In the pictures I’m a little girl and he’s several years younger than I am now. He tells me about how he was able to adapt and how he decided never to return to Buenos Aires although he should’ve gone back on several occasions. He says he wouldn’t be able to bear walking those streets now, that his first and greatest love disappeared in ’79 and his parents are dead. I understand now that Mario is gay, that he always has been. The great love he’s talking about was a beautiful boy with large eyes and a happy face, he shows me several photos of him. He says that he couldn’t bear to be in Buenos Aires without being able to see him, having to imagine everything they did to him, that he isn’t brave enough to face it, like the families of the disappeared have, that he’d just go crazy with sadness. He says all this with barely any emotion, as if he were explaining some natural phenomenon.

  He offers to go and talk to Frau Wittmann, show up in person and assure her, as a university department head, that I’m a student. I tell him that any kind of paperwork he could get me would be enough. He asks me what’s so special about living there. I don’t know how to explain it, being there is like not being anywhere, it’s being alone but surrounded by a lot of people, having everything without owning anything, and being able to pass unnoticed. I say that it’s cheap. He offers to let me stay at his house, he says there’s a spare room and that I can stay as long as I want, and I thank him and tell him that I’ll keep it in mind. He insists that as the pregnancy advances it would be better for me not to be alone. Outside it’s still raining. Old and yellowed photographs lie on the white tablecloth alongside the breadcrumbs, plates stained with sauce and empty glasses. We both fall silent for a moment then we clear the table, carefully putting away each photo like some treasure we alone know the value of. We make coffee. Mario promises that he’ll take care of the enrolment certificate today and we smile at each other, both feeling a little less alone and a little stronger.

  V

  It’s dark when Mrs Takahashi finally shows up at the residence. I’m about to shower and get into bed when I see her standing in the doorway wearing a black dress and bright red lipstick. I tell her that it’s past the residence’s curfew and I’m not allowed to let her in. She asks me to come out. She says she has a taxi waiting, that she wants to take me to dinner. I tell her that I plan to have a bowl of soup and go to sleep but she pleads with me, begs me to join her. We get in the taxi. I ask her about Mr Takahashi, she tells me that he left that morning for Tokyo.

  ‘Where do the students go at night?’ she asks me anxiously.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I tell her without trying to hide my annoyance.

  She puts the same question to the taxi driver who drops us off at a dark and noisy bar where they serve a lot of alcohol and not much food. I promise myself that this is the last time I agree to something like this. But for now I’m already here so I try to make the best of it. I look at the menu, there’s a drink special that comes with fries and other appetisers. I ask the waiter to make the drink with very little alcohol, repeating myself several times because the music is really loud. Mrs Takahashi orders champagne and fish croquettes. Two Germans of indeterminate age come over to our table and ask if they can join us. Mrs Takahashi says yes. The waiter brings us our food and the Germans order beer.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asks.

  ‘Girls’ night out,’ Mrs Takahashi responds.

  ‘Oh, gut, gut, gut,’ says the other and he asks us why we’re in Heidelberg.

  ‘We’re tourists,’ I answer but Mrs Takahashi raises a hand to interrupt me.

  ‘I came to bury my daughter who was a student.’

  The Germans look surprised and they ask her to repeat herself, saying that there’s too much noise and they couldn’t hear her. She repeats herself, raising her voice: ‘I came to bury my daughter who committed suicide three days ago, but that’s done with, now it’s girls’ night out.’

  The Germans exchange a worried glance. The waiter brings them their beers. Mrs Takahash
i proposes a toast to this beautiful city full of beautiful people. The four of us raise our glasses, we toast and drink in silence. Then, one of the Germans, the taller one, tells us that he’s celebrating the first anniversary of his divorce and that he’s happy to be with such pretty ladies. Mrs Takahashi laughs. I begin to feel dizzy. Mrs Takahashi gets up and starts dancing next to the table, she looks radiant. The taller German now does the same, trying to dance with her. The other one looks at me and says I look pale. I want to get up but I can’t. I tell him that I feel bad and I vomit on his shoes. The German screams and I vomit again. The waiter comes over and insults us; Mrs Takahashi tells everyone that I’m pregnant. I ask her to call a taxi to take me back to the residence right away. In a patronizing tone, the taller German explains that pregnant women shouldn’t drink alcohol. Mrs Takahashi hands several banknotes to the waiter, goes outside, and stops a taxi.

  We’re silent for most of the ride until she says gravely: ‘Shanice admired her father and she was afraid of me. She was afraid of turning into someone like me, but she was always just like me. There was no escaping it. She was brave, don’t you think?’

  I say that I don’t know, that we both need rest, that it’s been a difficult few days. The taxi stops in front of the residence, the cool air when I get out is refreshing. I turn and wave to Mrs Takahashi before going in, from inside the car she nods her head slightly and I think she might be crying. I go inside before the taxi drives away.

  FOUR

  I

  In the morning the world is spinning. I have to sit on the bed for a minute until I recover my balance. My body is adjusting to a lot of changes and I have to be patient with it. I feel bloated and I’m tired all the time. The brief outing yesterday with Mrs Takahashi was exhausting. Today, after sleeping all night, my eyelids are still heavy and I have cramps in my arms and legs. I’d like to spend the morning sleeping but I told Mario I’d meet him after his class. I look through Shanice’s things for something to wear, all my clothes are dirty. I put on a pink shirt with hearts on it and a skirt that’s too short for me. In Buenos Aires I would never wear something like this. Here, I can wear whatever and I’m too tired to keep trying on clothes. On the way out I greet Frau Wittmann, who’s reading the paper. She lifts her gaze and gives me a smile: ‘New look,’ she says and goes back to her paper.