Best of British Fantasy 2018

by Jared Shurin

  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 entirely 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.

  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, p
retending 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 present 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 as if 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.