Читать книгу Now I Climb Rocks - Liv Hambrett - Страница 7

It was late November. The weather had cooled to its usual early-winter briskness and the days were short, sharp and dark. We were a month from winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, a lethargic blink of begrudging light not worth getting out of bed for. In Weiden’s tiny Altstadt their Christmas market had just popped up. It was small and quaint, like the town’s Altstadt itself, and had been an annual town staple since 1600. The stalls clustered mainly around the little old Rathaus, a pointy-roofed, avocado-green, vine-covered storybook building that was built between 1539 and 1545, and the town felt more alive than it did any other time of year. This wasn’t particularly difficult - nothing much ever happened in Weiden in der Oberpfalz.

In an apartment very close to the centre of town, opposite a big church and land-lorded over by a man whose meaty, dense Oberpfälzisch dialect we could never understand, we were at a somewhat uncertain point in our young lives. We were bound to Weiden, a place we simply could not get on with, by Julian’s job. I could only find a few crumbs of work, enough to get me out of the house once a week and pay for the groceries once a month. We had, in fact, already failed in this town: the previous year, a few months after moving to Weiden from Münster in Germany’s west, I had flown back home to Australia, alone, to try and figure out if this country – and the relationship keeping me in it – was what I wanted. It was and I went back, but not to Weiden. Julian was sent to do a six-month placement in Kiel, his Heimat, and so I joined him there, in an attic apartment on the same stony street his Oma had raised her girls on. It was the third state I had lived in in Germany, hopping from west to south east to far north, and I knew it was there, if anywhere, I belonged in this country. The sea and its huge swooping gulls, the brisk northerners with their dry humour and steadfast loyalty. No mountains, no gingerbread houses, just gloriously flat, blue coastline and thatched red brick. I found work, I made friends and life unfurled once more. When we left Kiel to return to Weiden for the foreseeable future, Julian applied to return north as soon as possible. While our application was being considered, we could only wait. Even if we were successful, even if there was a job going back up north, things in German bureaucracy move glacially. There was no telling at that point how long we would be stuck down south. Begrudgingly, but boosted by our northern stint, in our apartment opposite the big Catholic church, we waited.

Days were slow and sleepy. I baked a lot, something I had never been particularly good at but learnt to love. It felt productive, as if I had something to show for spending so much time at home, alone, waiting for Julian to come back from work, waiting to hear back from language schools I had sent my CV to, waiting to hear whether we would be relocated, waiting to hear if anyone wanted to publish my writing. I went on walks around the town, searching for and occasionally finding little pockets of cobbled-street beauty that I tucked into my own narrative of Antipodean on a grand European adventure even though the adventure felt terribly ungrand and slightly off-course. I watched a lot of television illegally, homing in on a particular sitcom featuring a woman floundering around in her late twenties, and I wrote a lot. With Julian working shifts, I spent a lot of time on my own, often at my desk in the apartment’s second bedroom, staring out the window at the huge church whose bells tolled faithfully every fifteen minutes. In time, my thoughts wandered to and stayed very much preoccupied both by what I wanted from this time in my life and from my approaching thirties. Perhaps there was an element of Torschlusspanik (the sensation of panic one encounters as a door begins to close on an era within which you haven’t achieved what you wanted, commonly experienced at turn-of-the-decade birthdays) associated with an encroaching thirtieth, or perhaps it was simply that one’s navel makes for excellent gazing when there’s not much else to do. My thirties had a vague shape that was yet to begin taking form: the glamorous life of a famous author had not yet beckoned, although I nurtured hope I would be discovered in my little linoleum-floored office where I churned out reams of blog posts, content-mill travel articles and never-to-be-read fiction. I wanted children, generally speaking, and I wanted them, generally speaking, sooner rather than later, younger rather than older.

I had never thought children belonged to my twenties per se, but they seemed to be a part of my imagined thirties, presumably beamed there at some point to complete the picture of me, glossy and professional, accomplished and assured, flanked by miniature versions of myself. But as the sleepy days in Weiden passed by and my homemade bread got better and no news came of a possible transferral north, something began to happen: the chubby little forms hovering on the horizon began to sharpen.

At my desk, in between the unreadable fiction and the blog posts, I started crunching the numbers of my life and its temporal budgets and, as we settled back into Bavarian life, I decided I wanted to get started on children soon. Immediately, really. Nightmare scenarios of being stuck in Weiden for years, loomed large. What if we kept putting off kids until ‘things were better’ unbeknownst to us that things weren’t going to get better – that is, we weren’t going to be transferred – for years?

The three fates up there with their thread might keep dolling out the Weiden yarn for a decade before giving it a snip – how were we, mere mortals, to know what German bureaucracy had in store for us? In a decade I would be heading towards forty, presumably unemployable after a decade of unemployment in the void of Weiden, and if we didn’t get started on children, didn’t get over the ‘let’s wait and see’ hump, I’d be childless too. Panic began to flutter in that way it does when you think you are able to see into the future. This wasn’t how it was supposed to look. The panic fluttered alongside other things, key in creating the urge to move, to decide. I was lonely - days, they were so empty with no work in sight to fill them.

Friends and family, they were so far away. Impatience, loneliness, and the slow, empty days of walking in circles began to swirl with the panic and together the concoction bubbled and broiled. From the cauldron rose an impetus I had hitherto never had in that quiet town.

Being female, however, is a noisy endeavour. We get our period – which must be endured quietly, cleanly and demurely shamefully – and spend the next fifteen years being told loudly how ruinous pregnancy would be and how we must do everything in our power – and it was always in our power, not in the penis’s – to avoid it. Finish school, get qualified, get a job, do really, really well at that job and climb, climb, climb. Decide, at some point, if you want children and justify that decision, whatever it may be, to all and sundry as you climb, climb, climb. If you do want them, then don’t put it off for too long because your eggs will shrivel, and the winds of time will slam the fertile window closed and all those years you spent terrified of getting pregnant will seem so very redundant. Obviously don’t have kids young because you’ll waste your twenties and those years are for finding yourself, so you’re a better mother when the time comes – one can only know oneself as a mother, if one has discovered oneself appropriately within the decade assigned for self-discovery. Don’t, though, have them when you’re too much older, because you’ll have wasted your most fertile and energetic years and you’ll be inflexible and exhausted. Actually, don’t have children at all, because the world is burning, and over-population will be the end of everything. If you do, though, babies are expensive, make sure you have plenty in savings; babies don’t need that much, stop mindlessly consuming. Plan carefully, you can’t plan for it.

Wait for the right time, there is no right time, you’ll know the right time when it comes.

Which brings us to a cold November afternoon in our gemütlich apartment with a tiny, sparsely decorated Christmas tree. As people zipped up their winter jackets and walked briskly into town to cluster around wooden tables and clink ceramic mugs, I was sitting at home clutching a pregnancy test, waiting for Julian to get back from work. A friend, visiting for the weekend, was due in at ten-past five at the train station and Julian was aiming to get home at around a quarter to, so we could do the test together. Five days late, second month into trying, I wanted to confirm I was pregnant before my friend arrived, namely because the purpose of her visit was to reunite over litres of Glühwein. In the window of time between Julian walking in the door, and me running out to the station, we stared at the two resolutely blue lines in silence. They were precisely what we wanted, but even so, I remember, with absolute clarity, looking at Julian and saying, ‘oh my God, what have we done?’

The right time, it seemed, had come.