I want to tell Bea to drop it, that she shouldn’t care, and should just concentrate on herself, her goals, and her schoolwork instead.
By the end of those two weeks in Laueli, the woodpile that Sven stacked was as high as my shoulder, and Sven had welts on the inside of his right hand and scabs on the knuckles of both.
By the time I’d finished my book, it had about two hundred manuscript pages, and I rewrote many times the scene where the main character cuts her friend’s kid’s hair and accidentally cuts his ear — before I decided to leave it out.
What if we’d built K23 together?
We could have been a part of it. Taken up Ingmar’s offer — either the money or the idea to move into the ground-floor flat that he financed with the money he couldn’t dump on us. Because no one else wanted that flat, but you can’t build a house without a ground floor. So, after a great deal of back and forth, he called the ground floor an investment, even though he was against the idea of owning but not living in a property. And we would have been a good compromise because although we’re not Ingmar, we’re like family, and so in a way, him, and nice and colourful too, and we add spice to the mix.
Ingmar: ‘It’s outrageous that there are empty flats in the city centre. In these times! In this global situation!’
Frank: ‘Put an ad on Immoscout, and you’ll have thirty requests by tomorrow.’
Ingmar: ‘But I don’t want to live with just anybody. Some Immoscout user.’
Frank: ‘What have you got against Immoscout?’
Ingmar: ‘Nothing. I’d just like somebody I know and like. Who suits us.’
Vera: ‘Then wait a bit. Perhaps somebody will turn up.’
Ellen: ‘My cousin might be moving to Berlin next year.’
Ingmar: ‘When next year?’
Ellen: ‘Although … would she take the ground floor?’
Friederike: ‘Is she the one with the fair-trade clothes?’
Ellen: ‘Yes, that’s her. “Port Coton.”’
Friederike: ‘Cool. Get her over here.’
Ellen: ‘She said she might be moving. But to be honest …’
Friederike: ‘Aren’t we good enough for her?’
Ellen: ‘Of course! She’d love it. But on the ground floor? Without kids? I wouldn’t.’
Ingmar: ‘I’d like somebody with kids, who needs a flat, who’d appreciate it. Preferably somebody normal and uncomplicated—’
Vera: ‘Jana’s always looking for private flats for refugees.’
Friederike: ‘Uncomplicated?’
Vera: ‘Somebody who needs it and would appreciate it.’
Christian: ‘Don’t fall for that. Some refugees have really high expectations. Whoever manages to get over here comes from money. And they have pretty big ideas. Just like your fair-trade cousin.’
Ellen: ‘Her name’s Britta. And you didn’t want to live on the ground floor either.’
Christian: ‘I’m not saying I did. I like high expectations.’
Ingmar: ‘You make it sound like the flat is a cesspit — and not all refugees are the same. The ones who have lived in the shelter long enough with their families—’
Christian: ‘I’d be careful. It turns them into animals. A friend of my dad’s in Stuttgart owns a block of flats that are being renovated especially for refugees, and six weeks after they moved in, they had to start all over again. They cooked on the floor, didn’t clean the toilets—’
Vera: ‘They were unaccompanied children. Boys.’
Friederike: ‘They’re the ones who need housing the most.’
Frank: ‘And are you going to look after them?’
Friederike: ‘No, why? They have counsellors from Youth Welfare and some sort of voluntary helpers.’
Christian: ‘And the rent is always paid on time by social services.’
Ingmar: ‘It’s not about the rent.’
Ellen: ‘Are you serious? A bunch of young machos living on the ground floor? Our girls aren’t that little anymore—’
No one said anything of the sort. And even if they had, it wasn’t meant that way. And anyway, anybody else would have done the same! An agreement had to be reached somehow.
January 2014; the K23 common room.
Every K23 resident was given three sticky dots — three votes, in other words. Votes could be accumulated or split.
There was a brief discussion about whether the children should be allowed to vote, and if so, from what age, and whether they could have only one vote. Christian managed to assert himself with the argument that some life experience was required to make such an important decision.
Frank brought a flipchart from work.
On it, Friederike noted the options in her lovely handwriting, and then everybody stuck on their dots.
‘Stop, stop, stop!’ Ingmar cried. ‘Please take into account the different criteria.’
What were they again?
Friederike flipped over the paper with the options and noted on a new piece of paper:
Poverty
Nice personality
Threat to the house community
Usefulness for the house community
Threatened in their country of origin
Culture (macho, good at music, language barriers, religion)
Rent
Suits us
New horizons
as people shouted these suggestions out.
Everybody memorised the criteria. Then Friederike flipped the paper back to the first page, and everybody stuck their dots.
Ingmar: ‘What we’re doing here is nobody’s business. If you ask me, Resi has been planning this for a long time. She could’ve moved in, but didn’t because she wanted to see what we would do with the empty flat. Just so she could provoke exactly this scene and capitalise on it.’
Friederike: ‘Exactly like in her article. She always hated our house.’
Vera: ‘And I loved her. I still love her.’
Dear Vera,
Perhaps the first thing you should do is to stop loving me.
True, we have known each other since we were three years old, and we’ve been through a lot together, and you know and understand me in a way that hardly anybody else does. But you don’t have to love me because of that. No one has to.
Your instinct is yours alone, and the commandment about loving thy neighbour is probably the biggest bunch of codswallop in the Bible and an excellent reason to leave the Church. It’s also a reason to refuse the role model of girl/wife/mother, seventy-eight per cent or so of which is about being loving.
Let’s just say ‘fuck it’. Let’s hate each other and then maybe we’ll find out if
