Small Acts of Disappearance (5 page)

One of my Australian friends now living in Berlin claims the trick to a German-style breakfast is to empty your pantry onto the table.

I was talking to Christian about Berlin, how fascinated I had been by the very visible layerings of history on the skin of the city, struggling to express this in my clumsy, flat-tongued German. Christian had been born there, but was evacuated as a small child to his relatives in the countryside near Hanover in the early stages of the war, only ever able to return on short visits after the division of the country. He loves the region that he lives in, its potted history, the way its old monarchs came to rule over England. ‘You see,
Fichen,'
he said suddenly, ‘This is why we think of you, still, as our Australian daughter! You were always interested, always keen to be involved. You were always
curious,
yes?' The German word for curious,
neugierig,
means greedy for the new.

I stopped pushing the cheese around my plate, telescoped suddenly outside of my self. I saw the image had stayed frozen there, in someone else's eyes, across the intervening years. I got a glimpse of my fuzzy sixteen-year-old self, overseas for the first time, as yet uncomplicated by disease.

Hannelore took me to the markets that morning, where
eggs were sorted into cartons according to the colour of their shell. She introduced me to their greengrocer, a bow-armed, braided woman, and bought me a dried fruit mix named ‘Sunshine' because it made her think about my home. We stopped in at a church on the way back where a group of women were raising funds for the blind, by teaching passersby to type in Braille, using a six-pronged machine. I stepped up to have a try, and the young woman in charge immediately asked
‘Können Sie Deutscht
?'

Hannelore visibly expanded in pride. ‘Fiona,' she said, ‘is a
Germanist.'

I'd never though of myself in that way before, either.

In Berlin, I was constantly being asked why I had learnt German, even by the ex-pat writers I kept meeting, most of whom could only stumble through a menu or a ticket purchase, regardless of how long they had been living in the city. There were exceptions, of course: the students studying Heidegger, Marx or Kant, those who'd learnt bedroom intimacies from local girlfriends. No one ever believes me when I say I love the way the language sounds, how full and fleshy it feels in the mouth, how chewy. But it's also a systematic language, bound by rules, by precise and careful delineations. It may well be that this is what appeals to me, this structure, this clarity. This regulation. This control.

It took me some weeks to adjust to the different rhythm of time in Berlin. I've always been an early riser, but this city
doesn't shake itself awake, in summer at least, until close to noon. Instead, I walked the streets in the mornings, the furry blossoms of linden trees drifting in heaps around me, the footpaths uneven and cracked by tree roots. In my first days, mapless, I went searching for remnants of the Wall, traced instead the lines of metal plates embedded in the street to mark its footprint. I was barely three months out of hospital, that first, fraught admission and I wasn't supposed to be walking like this. But I was in Walter Benjamin's city, a flâneur's city, and I was terrified by the ferocity of the cyclists to boot. I took to having breakfast, once the shutters started rolling up, in a café called Suicide Sue, each day a single slice of bread with tomato and soft cheese.

In those first days I'd felt stiff-tongued and dumb. It had been at least six years since I'd last had cause to use my German, and my mouth had rusted over. I could understand everything that was being said to me, eavesdrop on conversations, but the words I wanted to use were always hovering somewhere just out of my reach. I spent a lot of time nodding, smiling my way through shop transactions, unable to participate properly in the small social exchanges of the everyday. I was without words, somehow, and I felt it all the more keenly, this slipping away of language, because I was in the city to write.

Even as I started to remember, to refamiliarise, I realised I still had to rely on simpler constructions, simpler approximations for the things I wanted to say. In German, I was unsubtle, convoluted, and anything but witty. In a
foreign language I had a different personality and it was never possible to see a person that I recognised reflected in my interactions with other people. I had a massage one afternoon, and cried upon being touched.

Six months after my first stay in Münster, Daniele made her reciprocal visit to Sydney. My family's house is perched on the edge of bushland, at the point where the valley that it covers becomes too steep to build on. Besides her hockey, Daniele had always been a jogger, she was muscular and strong, and once jokingly referred to her lycra-clad body as a
Kampfwürstchen,
a little combat sausage. She was horrified by how few flat areas there were to jog along near my house, but did it anyway, coming back with the prickles we've always called stickybeaks clinging to her socks.

Daniele's family didn't have a computer – they still don't – so when she typed emails home to her father's university address or to school friends, she took close to an hour, staring at the keyboard and pressing each key individually with her index finger. I helped her out a few times, typing from her dictation, pausing occasionally to ask about unusual, beautiful words. In one email to Daniele's best friend, I'd typed her words:
Mein Eßverhältnis, Gott sei Dank, bleibt gut.
‘My eating behaviour, thank god, is still fine.' I didn't question her at the time, pretended that I didn't understand the folded compound word. I didn't know what lay ahead.

As a part of their support for foreign students, the Goethe Institut, where the language course for my fellowship was held, offered a series of cultural events: film screenings, walking tours, mini-golf. I loved the three-hour walking tours, of course, but also signed up for a daytrip, on a Sunday, catching the fast train northwards to Oranienberg and Sachsenhausen, the first concentration camp built by the Nazi regime. I was sitting next to a broad-shouldered Canadian, who'd taken a liking to me earlier that week, when we'd surreptitiously, illicitly, held an English conversation in the Institut's courtyard. He'd rocked up to our meeting point barely able to walk, clutching at a kebab and wearing lipstick on his cheekbone, mumbling something about a club with a giant swing. I was furious at his goofy, boozy grin, and deliberately lost him as soon as we disembarked.

There's a long walkway leading up to the gates of the camp, with wildflowers pressing up along its borders. I picked a small, orange poppy to wear in my hair.

Sachsenhausen is a terrible place, a fraught place, stark and bare, its triangular parade grounds open to the sky. It was a labour camp, filled at first with writers, artists, activists, conscientious objectors, homosexuals, criminals, before gypsies and Jews were added to Hitler's list of undesirables. Few buildings remain there now: the three watchtowers, one of the barracks, the morgue. The central ground is dominated by a red-brick monument, built by the GDR government in the 1960s, to commemorate the early German socialists who were interned there – the Party always claimed their state
was founded by the people who had resisted fascism right throughout Hitler's reign.

Sachsenhausen was not initially an extermination camp, although it was expanded later to include a series of gas chambers. It was the first labour camp, allied with local industry. The inmates were made to walk endless laps of the parade ground to test the durability of shoes. In this camp, it was discovered that hungry inmates are less likely to have the energy to rebel.

Much of what we know about the physicality of starvation comes from studies conducted by and with the starving population of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland. In the two years that the studies ran, before the final liquidation of the Ghetto, almost thirty malnourished Jewish doctors living within its limits studied growth rate, weight, organ size, dermatology, immunology, circulation, fluid retention, bone density, body temperature, vitamin retention, the functioning of the senses, of hormones, of digestion. In two years, they conducted 3658 autopsies. Only seven of the doctors survived the war. One, a pathologist, Theodosia Goliborska, emigrated to Australia in 1946, and continued to practise at least until the 1980s, in this country that has never had to understand such desperate, widespread hunger.

We learn about hunger through hardship, through war or famine, natural disaster or political crisis. We learn
through bodies forced to the edge, bodies that have become sites of trauma, collateral damage in conflicts, famines, persecution. It's a terrible laboratory that our knowledge comes from, and a horrific debt that I often feel I owe, because my body could not have been nursed back towards health without these studies born of suffering. I still have trouble, sometimes, recognising that I didn't choose my hunger. That no one ever does.

I arrived in Berlin at the height of
Spargelzeit,
the two or three weeks in late spring when asparagus is ripe and super-abundant, and sold in bunches as thick as my thigh, translucent white, or mottled green. The old-style German restaurants and pubs all display blackboards near their geranium beds, listing asparagus menus: asparagus quiche, asparagus soup, asparagus gratin, asparagus hollandaise; they continue to serve giant wurst and pork knuckles and schnitzels, peas and carrots out of cans. In a way, this was a blessing: I'm comfortable eating asparagus, but still can't even imagine sitting down to eat a schnitzel that overspills a dinner plate. After
Spargelzeit
comes strawberry season, and a stall sprouted suddenly outside my communist-era apartment block, painted red with a green canvas roof, manned by a beautiful, bored strawberry-blonde in denim shorts.

Along with this celebration in Germany of the seasonality of food, I realised too that Germans
believe
– the
word is not too strong – in butter. Only skim milk under sufferance. Consider cake part of their cultural heritage. It was barely three months since I'd been discharged from the hospital, but I could see how far I'd come, against this backdrop. Even though I was struggling, slowly cutting back and skipping meals, if I had been in Berlin before the hospital, I would have panicked every time my bread was buttered, refused to drink my coffee if it wasn't made on skim, been unable to even taste the cakes my classmates bought in the breaks between our lessons.

On my last day in Münster, Hannelore and Christian took me to visit the ancestral home of the area's most famous lyric poet, the eccentric, ardent Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. I walked through her low-roofed, top-floor bedroom, running my fingers across her writing desk, her curiosity cabinet filled with speckled-shelled blown eggs, pinned dragonflies. Her bed was hard and thin and narrow.

Hannelore packed a dinner for my four-hour train trip back to Berlin: a two-cheese sandwich with butter, an apple and a peach. A box of chocolate biscuits, one box of pralines, a packet of
Gummibärchen,
a glass bottle of mineral water. We had strawberry tart for afternoon tea, and Hannelore asked me if I wanted cream beside it. She smiled when I declined. ‘I didn't think so,' she said, ‘Daniele never takes cream either, you always had such similar tastes. I remember when we had pancakes, you both would pat
them down with kitchen paper. Pat, pat, pat, with kitchen paper, before you ate them.'

I didn't know what to say. I had been well then, I didn't know what lay ahead.

IN MINIATURE

 

 

 

 

 

I
t seems a strange place to start writing about the miniature, but I want to begin on the internet, because I found there, for a time, a thing I could hardly have conceived would have existed, a community of illness, specifically for the kinds of illnesses that we often keep silent and hidden within ourselves. I want to begin on the internet because I found there a space for grim jokes about vomiting on a stranger's shoes or pretending to understand when others talk about fry-up hangover breakfasts, for complaining about the poor quality of hospital food, or ridiculous dietetic terms like ‘fun food' for the kinds of things – like chocolate and chips – that cause us the most distress. I never expected to meet, in however disembodied a form, so many people whose bodies are also bearing the brunt of a similar hunger to mine.

I want to begin on the internet too because of an image
that circulates, from time to time, within this community of illness – virally, as it were – an ‘affirmation card' mercifully lacking in butterflies, sunsets, dolphins or daisies; hand-drawn, it begins with a question that seems simple, but which nagged at me for weeks when I first saw it:
Exactly why do we want to be smaller?

I've never been tall, I've never been large; and I've always been distressed by the way my illness made me bony, made me tiny, made me small. I know that this makes me unusual in this illness – that almost all of the other people I've met in treatment can only see their bodies as huge, and hideously so, even when they're only able to fit in to childrens' clothes. And I don't want to be any smaller, not at all. But the question stayed with me, I realised, because I've gotten used to being small, and I know now that there's a part of me that can't imagine being otherwise, that maybe even doesn't want those changes, however uncomfortable and unattractive they may be, to reverse themselves. A part of me that's terrifying, and that's ugly too, perhaps because it's so irrational and seems like a desire to remain unwell when I want so much, and give so much time and energy and money, to become well. This smallness, or this awful desire to remain small is, perhaps, one of the last strongholds of my illness. But smallness, the miniature, has a profound and unsettling power of its own, and perhaps this is its appeal. It is, after all, a power that is as complex and contradictory as that of hunger itself.