Читать книгу Heimat - Liv Hambrett - Страница 5

The generosity of others helps when spaces need to be filled. We had already ripped up the old carpet and painted the walls with white paint we'd bought by the bucket and rolling paintbrushes we'd borrowed from a friend's bottomless basement. It was, I was to learn, the Germanic norm to repaint as a new tenant and indeed lay down new floors if you so desired. And it was ours. The threadbare, Kindergarten carpet had to go and in its place, shiny planks of laminate, part of our hardware shop haul, were laid. Now we had clean, white space and I had a few swimming costumes and a clutch of battered books with sand in their spines to fill it with.

Donations of a bed and a 70′s style ‘painter’s table’ desk came first – from the same bottomless basement as the paintbrushes - then a lovely big reading chair, scratched and scuffed by years of love. Then some shelves drilled to the wall one yellow Autumn afternoon, with the light coming in through the huge, naked windows. The drill bored, the plaster spraying into our hair, and the shelves slid into place; the whole time, all I could think about was how thrilling furniture is. My suitcase, full of clothes that would prove inadequate against a European winter - everything would prove inadequate against a European winter but I would find that out in due time – sat in the corner, next to my new bed. It was, until that week in Autumn where we put together a little home, the only anchor I had in this new world. But the desk, the reading chair, the shelves drilled into place, they were all new bricks, added weight, context. I put half-empty bottles of perfume on the shelves and a little glass of shells and hair clips and what-nots from Santorini, feather-light anchors themselves. An Ikea trip yielded a wardrobe and I finally stopped living out of a suitcase. It was a tiny wardrobe, but it was mine and it housed my things and I got to open its doors every morning. The wardrobe, out of everything, felt the heaviest. Ikea also provided a bedside table, a chair and some rose candles. Rose will always smell of that orange Autumn in which I was so exhilaratingly uncertain of what the hell I was doing.; of a time I had a big room, a little bit of pre-loved furniture and light streaming in from the naked windows and bouncing off the shiny, newly laid floor.

Books followed, new, crisp ones with jackets not yet bent or wrinkled. Little piles of crime fiction that grew one book at a time. Then folders of work documents and photocopies as I settled into a new job. More perfume, each scent tying itself resolutely to the moment, the time, the era in which it was bought. Shoes, ones appropriate for a Winter that was fast closing in, one that threatened snow and early. Clothes, big jumpers, a jacket deemed suitable for Winter, as opposed to the couple I had that were scoffed at as 'Autumn jackets'. Boxes of winter clothes sent from home, packed by my Mum with a jar of Vegemite wrapped up in a jumper. I think I cried when I opened the first box and found the Vegemite. The jar seemed a bit brave, a bit defiantly alone, like it had set out on a journey well outside its comfort zone. And it had found me, like the box of my jumpers and the A4 piece of paper covered in Mum's handwriting. It had all found me, even in my new room with its things completely unrelated to the life from which I had come.

And then after the anchors, come the little things, the additions that accumulate over the years and will be, down the track, subject to culling and clearing. Little markers of yourself, little splashes of colour that fill in the lines. You'll get rid of them in time, upgrade them, swap them, wonder why you ever bought them. Picture frames, vases, tea cups and coffee mugs, bed linen, calendars to break up the whiteness of those freshly painted walls. A blanket for the lovely big reading chair that is more to provide colour than warmth. And then one day, when Autumn had well and truly passed, seguing into a cold, grey Winter with heavy, bad tempered skies, I woke up and saw I had accumulated enough stuff to spill out of the shelves and wardrobe, to clutter the desk. A line of boots were stacked behind the door, books were doubling up, jumpers were squashed on top of one another and bulging out the sides. That furniture that had seemed like just enough, within the walls that had seemed un-fillable, was no longer sufficient. I needed more. I had enough things to stack in more shelves, to tuck away in more drawers. What an unexpectedly lovely realisation. As a traveller, I had actively, freely, gleefully left behind everything I owned, cutting my boat adrift. And there I was, revelling in being anchored, in weight. In being so heavy I needed more to accommodate the gain. I felt stable. I felt like I belonged. I felt like there were enough things in this town to make it a home, enough things in this room to show people I exist in layers and colours. And I realised the next time I move – because I would move again, Münster was not forever - I would have things to pack into a truck and ride with, things to fit out a new apartment with. Anchors for next time.

Making a home means measuring progress by both feeling and what fills your space. Leaving a solid, old, warm home for an adventure, no matter how adventurous you are, is to lose a little traction, to have your grip on yourself and what you know and what you have, become a little slippery. It is but one of the millions of tiny little adjustments we make over the course of our lives - that is, after all, what life seems to be, a series of adjustments, some more comfortable, more exciting than others. Some so difficult you long for that sense of sweet safety you had as a child, reaching for your father's knees and playing in your mother's wardrobe when she wasn't looking. And some that are so small, so seemingly inconsequential, they just happen. They fall into the little space you've unwittingly carved out for them with a small, barely audible thud and all of a sudden the street with its marching soldiers of elm trees that had felt so brand new and so foreign feels precisely like it ought to-- the pathway to your warm and waiting home.

Expectations explode when you move countries, and pieces of them land everywhere, some so cracked and splintered you can't ever put them back together again, you can only replace them with new ones. You have certain ideas of what it will all be like and what you’ll achieve. Most of all, you see it one way and then it goes and proves itself to exist in quite another. That isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s an excellent thing. Exploded expectations are completely necessary. You learn a lot, very quickly, about what you can and can’t do. You learn when to tell everyone telling you what you ‘should and shouldn’t do’ and what you ‘must do’ and ‘need to do’, to shut up, and when to block it all out. You learn when you need to listen to yourself, because this is no one else’s journey, these are no one else's stories but yours and yours alone. And you learn that, when something happens and those expectations explode all over again, and it feels like you are in complete and utter freefall – it helps to have some anchors, even if they are just second-hand books and a line of boots behind the door.

On the Directness of the Germans