Читать книгу Heimat - Liv Hambrett - Страница 9

Horns locked on the idea of what constitutes politeness, it was a barrier-crashing moment in our friendship. Suddenly we understood each other so much better. Both of us had acquired the appropriate filter through which to view our every interaction. We were both momentarily sucked into a vortex of running through past conversations at the end of which she either thought me a big, slippery pushover, and I, her, a little intimidatingly bossy. But it wasn't, as we now knew, about that; she was simply German and I, Australian. Nothing more, nothing less.

Reasonably early on in our cohabitation, my flatmate realised I had a problem with saying no. Indeed, quite often I would say ‘yes!’ when I meant ‘absolutely not and I am going to slide out of that as soon as I can’. One evening, she pinned me to the wall with her eyes and asked if I would like to accompany her to wherever she was going. It was late, it had been a long day and as I was on the verge of saying 'ohhhh, maybe, I will see how I go, but definitely maybe!' she said, 'you can just say no.' So I said it. I said, 'no.' I said it with a cocked head and slitted eyes, and with the same intonation as if I were saying 'yes!'. But I said it. And it was sublimely liberating. My flatmate simply nodded and blew me a kiss goodbye. No sign of being offended or affected by my 'no' in sight.

It was my own lack of directness that got me into a lengthy, frustrating misunderstanding that neither the Germans nor I could make heads and tails of. Precisely because I arrived in Germany without a lick of German, my progress in learning the language was one observed, commented upon and questioned with great enthusiasm by the Germans. As an Australian, it is in my DNA that to big-note myself is the most vile of things to do and so, when asked the inevitable and interminable 'how's your German now?' I would answer something along the lines of 'oh truly terrible, of course'. The Germans, not prone to unnecessary self-deprecation (perhaps another dishonest, waste of time) would tut tut and say 'well that's not good' and then launch into some crisply delivered, dripping-in-disapproval lecture about how I lived in Germany now, I had to speak German. It took me far, far too long to realise I had to stop being afraid of saying something positive about my own abilities because Germans do not, as we do, cut down poppies. That would also be in ineffective waste, and Germans don't do ineffective.