Читать книгу Now I Climb Rocks - Liv Hambrett - Страница 8

Christmas in Germany has a smell. It’s cinnamon and woodsmoke and burnt sugar, carried across wet air that hints of the real, bone-deep cold – the January and February cold – to come. The shops become labyrinths of chocolate-covered gingerbread, crunchy spiced biscuits and bready cakes shot through with marzipan and coated in sugar. At Christmas, calendars clutter with Plätzchen (little Christmas biscuits) baking and Weihnachtsmarkt dates. In almost every Rathausplatz across the country, a huge Christmas tree presides over the rows of wooden market stalls and on at least one wall of every home is an Adventskalendar. Children and adults alike eat chocolate for breakfast. Sugar, hot alcohol and baked cheer pump through everyone’s veins. People’s trolleys clink with ruby bottles of Glühwein – mulled wine aptly known as ‘glow wine’ – as they hurry home out of the foul weather and into apartments that pay homage to the German art of Gemütlichkeit. Gemütlichkeit to Germans is what Hyyge is to the Danish, and while some people insist the English word ‘cosiness’ doesn’t do it justice, I think it does. Cosiness is candles and hot drinks, thick socks and oven fires, streetlights in puddles. Cosiness is yellow-lit windows on a dark afternoon, through which Christmas trees blink, and rain you don’t have to go out into. Books and dark mornings with a cup of coffee as the sun takes its time ushering out the stubborn dark. Cosiness is both a feeling and an atmosphere, the latter designed to coddle the former. I suppose, where gemütlich and cosy differ, is in the former’s envelopment of Gemüt. Your Gemüt is, to my understanding, a small, vital word that expands to fit your soul, your disposition, your sense of inner understanding and balance. All that appeals to it, then, all that restores it, is Gemütlich. December is cold, often wet and mostly enormously dreary outside. It is a month – and it precedes the months – during which one’s Gemüt is tired, suffering from a lack of light, recovering from the year and all its accompanying madness. December, the most magical month in the country, nurses your Gemüt with gingerbread and candlelight.

My own Gemüt that Christmas season, was undergoing something of a reshuffle. Indeed, it was – prompted by hormones as much as anything else – going a little haywire. As much as I had never felt particularly balanced or at ease in Weiden, falling pregnant had set off a flurry of internal doubt and agitation, a flurry which was ripping everything up and doing its best to send the pieces spinning untethered, unable to settle. It was the strangest thing to know that, as the world kept going, I was pregnant. The bells chimed, the sky turned to ink, and I was pregnant. The train roared into the tiny station and spat out my friend and her weekend bag, people hurried home, scarves around chins, bellies full of Lebkuchen and Glühwein, and I was pregnant. There was a cluster of cells inside my body, multiplying rapidly, with the end goal being an entirely new human. In me, of me, but not actually controlled by me. Part of me was repelled by the very notion I was hosting something that had little care for what I may or may not have wanted but was instead furiously determined simply to grow.

That same part of me, dormant while I actively went about creating the cluster of cells and envisioning all it promised with its pink cheeks and small socks, suddenly popped up to ask if it was what I really wanted. The whispers were relentless, finding the vulnerable entry points and burrowing in. Was I absolutely sure this was what I wanted? Wasn’t it a bit foolish, shouldn’t we have waited a little while longer? Did we have enough money – obviously not, but would we have enough coming in to feed a squalling mouth? Weren’t we both far too young and naïve to be parents? Had this been an impetuous foot-stomping reaction to boredom and not getting what we wanted, that is, to leave Bavaria? Did we actually know what we were doing?

I could still stop the alien if I wanted to. If it really wasn’t what I wanted. The evening the two lines appeared, I walked briskly to the station to collect my friend with a hummingbird in my throat, the beginnings of a vicious permanausea what would shadow me for months, and an overwhelming sense of panic that I had set something unstoppable and entirely ill-thought through in motion.

That night, my friend and I joined the clouds of spice and crowds of people down at the markets. I insisted on ordering our drinks if she minded the table, assuring her she would battle with the Oberpfälzisch dialect. This meant I could order Kinderpunsch – a children’s punch of sickly-sweet hot juice – without her noticing. The hubbub around us rose like nutmeg-scented smoke, the food stalls and proximity of people providing such heat, my forehead began to itch beneath its beanie. I sipped my juice, scratched my forehead and exhaled Christmas through my nostrils to keep the quiet, early, ominous swells of nausea at bay. The secret sat inside me like a little glowing gemstone, mine to keep or release. Mine to throw at someone and crack their world a little bit, just enough to fit another entire, brand new person into their lives, just enough to have their understanding of me morph a little, from carefree wine buddy to nauseated parent-to-be. But I kept my little gemstone, burning bright, to myself. We ate Christmas biscuits of ground nuts and fondant, the cold inching towards breathtaking and the dark afternoons and early evenings navy backdrops to the fairy tale-twinkle of Christmas lights.

The cells kept multiplying as we strolled cobblestones by day, ducking into cafes to warm up, and as they did and the gemstone glowed even more fiercely, the early ominous swells moved in and unpacked their bags. By the time I farewelled my friend at the station, waving cheerfully while pressing my lips into a thin, hard line and exhaling aggressively through my nose, a terribly unfortunate truth had asserted itself. As my Gemüt was in freefall, everything that existed to appeal to it, to ease its discomfort - the nutmeg, the cinnamon, the spicy hot wine and deep-fried cakes - were the very things that shot through my nostrils, barrelled down into my sternum, lit a fuse and sent the nausea swimming, shimmering, through my veins. Christmas, the most gemütlich of all seasons, was making me want to throw up.

A couple of days after our second OBGYN appointment, which confirmed I was six-ish weeks along and looking swell, my parents arrived and took up residence in an old hotel in Weiden’s Altstadt. It had been built into the old fortress wall that surrounded the old city and began life operating as a guest house in 1567. Its interior had last been refreshed sometime in the early 1980s. Mum and Dad had booked one of its most luxurious suites, a tribute to pine and maroon upholstery, named after German president Richard von Weizsäcker who had bedded down there in 1988. A faded picture of him still hung on the wall. (Weiden had a thing with commemorating its famous visitors. A tiny plaque with ‘Goethe slept here’ was still affixed to the wall out the front of an old house. Goethe slept there in 1786.)

After much back and forth, Julian less stubborn about the matter than I, we had decided to keep the news to ourselves for the first trimester. I was, admittedly, slightly superstitious that sharing the news early – and it was early, barely a moment into gestation – would invite misfortune. But there was also the feeling that we ourselves had not had time to fully process the sheer breadth of the news. We had had a total of two days alone since the test had revealed its two blue stripes, barely enough time to stop repeating useless platitudes like ‘I can’t believe it’ and ‘what are we doing?’. I wanted to wait until that sense of disbelief transmuted into excitement, pleasure, hope – happiness unhindered by uncertainty – before I told anyone. Julian had also received other good news and kept it under his hat during the weekend my friend was here, revealing it with alcohol-free champagne when I returned home from dropping her at the station: we were being sent back to Kiel. A job had opened up in the precise office he wanted to work in, and they had accepted his application. As life is wont to function, our wresting control from the fates and making a decision about our future had occurred blissfully unaware someone else was making a decision about our future at the same time. So now we were, after two years of waiting and wondering when something would happen, both expecting a baby and moving across the country, two bits of news that had shown up on our front doorstep on the same day.

It was cold and icy when Mum and Dad arrived. We had had a decent falling of snow the day before their train from Munich was due and, overnight, temperatures were plunging to as low as -17. Prior to that visit, the last time my parents had been in Germany was a few years earlier, when I had first moved to Münster. It hit around -3 during their visit then, the perfect temperature for the fluffy snow to fall and stick, and my father to end up surreptitiously changing their flights to get them out of freezing Europe three weeks earlier than planned.

A Bavarian winter was going to test us all, although I was to remain quite thoroughly distracted by trying not to throw up whenever we walked past a Glühwein stall, which was every three minutes.

In rather poor timing, prior to my parents’ arrival, I had been prescribed progesterone. My levels were apparently low, which can sometimes indicate a non-viable pregnancy, and so I was instructed to insert two pills a day, three times a day, and lie quite still for up to an hour or so, while they were absorbed into my body. The doctor firmly instructed me to take them vaginally – German medicine rests on the power of the suppository, something my very non-German sensibilities continue to struggle with. The side effects of progesterone, worsened by taking it orally, are essentially like the first trimester squared – headaches and nausea and mood swings and irritability and bloating and dizziness and joint pain and cramping. After a few days of regular insertion, the progesterone nausea was a roiling, stormy mass that sluiced through my veins and sloshed around my sternum. My face semmed to permanently prickle with sweat. Vomit stayed at the top of my throat, lapping like a lake’s edge on a calm day, thrashing furiously along a beach’s shoreline on other days, but never actually came out. There was little that could be done, bar a few not particularly helpful things like, for example, post progesterone-insertion every morning, lying unmoving and nibbling a cracker. I had continued to develop the subtle breathing technique that involved extremely slow and lengthy exhalations out my nose, pushing nauseating scents as far out of my body as I possibly could, a technique that was serving me well.

I drank a lot of ginger tea, merrily claiming it was warming during these colder months, hopeful my mother’s radar wouldn’t ping at my disinterest in – inability to even be in the same room as – black tea and coffee. I took the wine bull by the horns early and said I was off alcohol for a while in an attempt to be healthier, after hitting it too hard in the preceding months. Mum said it was a very sensible idea, as she sipped her wines over dinner. Mostly, by the afternoon, the nausea had receded a little, so the post-lunchtime hours spent gambolling around medieval towns in the frigid, cleansing air, weren’t completely unenjoyable, albeit spent as an emotional, physical grenade, permanently on the cusp of throwing up.

Bamberg, Regensburg and Nuremberg form the triangle of beautiful cities in which Weiden in der Oberpfalz sits. A fourth point of fairy taleesque beauty lies north-west of Nuremberg: Würzburg, a city dominated by the Baroque Würzburger Residenz palace, and hemmed by sloping vine-yards. Confident the three sites of Weiden (Altstadt, Rathaus, tiny Lutheran church in a sea of Catholicism) would take a day to cover with my parents, we devised an itinerary that aimed to include the various bergs and burgs that form the larger, more impressive jewels in Bavaria’s crown. Bamberg came first, a city of timber buildings, cobbled streets, and a canal snaking through its centre. Bamberg’s old town hall is suspended, via two linking bridges, over this canal, and the tiny building sits there like a storm blew it there a few hundred years ago and there it has stayed ever since. We arrived in Bamberg around lunchtime. My mother had been reading Simon Winder’s Germania, in which he mentions a particularly outstanding and lesser known attraction – the Bamberg Natural History Museum. It wasn’t just the museum itself my mother was particularly keen on seeing, rather the bird hall.

The bird hall is precisely that – a vast, ornate hall filled with 1255 taxidermied, two-hundred-year-old birds, organised in various mise en scène involving branches and painted backdrops of water. Pelicans and cockatoos, swans and finches, parrots and pigeons from all over the globe, all seemingly nearing their 100th year on earth, and looking slightly deflated for it, gazed out from glass cases.

We paid our entry and filed into the museum, disrobing as we entered the overheated innards of the old building. Winter in Germany means one is constantly either winding a scarf around one’s neck and putting a coat on or unwinding the scarf and taking the coat it off: there is seemingly no comfortable inbetween. Or at least the in-between doesn’t ever seem like it’s long enough to warrant the rigmarole of robing and disrobing fourteen times a day. While Germans have made a science out of airing rooms out by timing the opening of specific windows to create air movement but avoid a draught, they haven’t quite figured out how to turn the heating down a notch. Walking inside during the months November through April, is like being belted repeatedly in the face with a hot, wet blanket – there is a sense of pure urgency to getting your coat off, before you pass out or your neck breaks out in a rash.

There was something even more airless than usual about the Natural History Museum, and something further airless still about the bird hall. As we wandered around looking at the beady eyes of birds forever suspended in glass boxes, I felt it begin to build. At first, it always feels somewhat ignorable, something you could handle with a deep breath and a sip of water. Then it gains momentum and your fingertips go cold.

Staring at an albatross, I felt the wave begin somewhere around my knees and gather pace, surging steadily upwards.

The bird’s glassy eyes watched on as I inched towards the door, breathing quietly, and casually whispered to Mum about needing to nip outside. ‘It’s so warm in here,’ I mouthed over the stork case, fanning my face theatrically. Mum agreed, rolling her eyes and continuing on with South American parrot case.

I made it outside and bent over in the alleyway, hands on knees, retching futilely as people trotted into the museum behind me. It probably appeared, to the casual onlooker, that I was a mime artist miming the act of vomiting. The cold air was wonderful, albeit spiced with Christmas, and the bile that was threatening at the base of my throat stayed put. I longed for a good vomit, an exorcism of the sour nausea that threshed like a stranded orca. But the vomit never came. As the threat receded, the nausea was replaced by a feeling of terrific faintness.

I was learning, quickly, the extent to which one’s body is not one’s own during pregnancy, merely a host subject to the whims of a rapidly growing leech and the gads of hormones it required to thrive. Mum came out soon after, agreeing it was far too warm, and I cheerfully suggested, in a high-pitched, slightly urgent voice, the possibility of eating. If she was surprised by the pace at which I bolted for a Flammkuchen (tarte flambée) stall, set us up at a Stehtisch (standing table) and ordered two classic squares of bacon, cream and onion laden pastry, she didn’t say anything. She did, however, later offer me a sip of her Eierpunsch (an egg and white wine-based hot punch) and I had to concede, for reality’s sake, while trying not to heave as the hot white wine and egg yolk brew tickled my nostrils. Fortunately, everyone was heaving about the Eierpunsch because it is, in its very essence, a revolting drink.

My parents left as Christmas loomed, Mum only mildly suspicious. We would see them the following January, having booked a trip to Australia and New Zealand for a family wedding. The thought of blue skies and southern hemisphere sun-shine and not a mulled wine in sight, was endlessly appealing.

I was rapidly tiring of December with its scents and cheer, its assault on my free-falling Gemüt. I needed all of it to disappear, the cinnamon, the wine, the bloody nutmeg, to be blown away by the brutal bareness of January. My Gemüt didn’t need Gemütlichkeit, it needed room to think, days to do nothing but remain horizontal and slide crackers into my mouth like CDs.

It needed space and time and unscented silence to make its acquaintance with my body’s guest. Now, just one thing stood between me and the balm of January’s emptiness: Christmas at the in-laws.