Sample Translation Karen Duve, This Is Not A Love Song Opening pages, translated by Anthea Bell When I was seven I swore I'd never fall in love. When I was eighteen I fell in love anyway. It was just as bad as I'd feared. It was humiliating, painful and totally beyond my control. My feelings were not returned, there was nothing I could do about it, and my own attempts to fall out of love again nearly sent me round the bend. When you realize you're going crazy the best idea is to keep quiet about it and pretend you're in perfect mental health by behaving like everyone else. All the other girls had boyfriends and sex and careers, they went to parties, they travelled, and they spent five whole days looking forward to the weekend. So I went to bed with men too, and I went to bars with women, I failed to make the grade in various jobs, I was bored out of my mind at parties and elsewhere, and I carved patterns on my upper arms with a potato-peeling knife on Sundays. Meanwhile Bayern Munich won the German football championship eight times. All the people I knew bought watches with digital displays and swapped their flares for tight jeans or tapered pants. Iran denounced the USA as the Great Shaitan, and MTV began its programmes with "Video Kills the Radio Star", by the Buggles. British soldiers marched into the Falkland Islands, Soviet soldiers marched into Afghanistan, American soldiers marched into Grenada. All the people I knew turned in their digital watches again in favour of normal watches with hands and a dial, and bought Walkmen. Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power station scattered radiation all over Europe, we were advised not to eat wild mushrooms for the next twenty years, and for a whole two years we really didn't eat as many mushrooms as before. The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan again, the Cold War came to an end, and when no one believed it ever would the Berlin Wall fell. Models got more famous and thinner all the time, computers grew smaller and the hole in the ozone layer larger, in summer these days joggers trotted out only early in the morning and late in the evening, and the man I loved moved to London. We had the Gulf War, the Balkan Wars, the Chechen War, and America intervened in Somalia. Civil wars broke out in Uganda and Liberia and Georgia, and Azerbaijan fought Armenia. And the pop songs still carried on about love. And men and women kept on having babies and going to marriage counsellors and therapists and getting divorced. Personally I never felt that any of this had anything to do with me. I was holding my breath all the time, so to speak, waiting for my cue, waiting for the words that must be spoken before I came out on stage from behind the curtain and joined the action. But life went on and on, the words weren't spoken, and the years piled up like dirt and dead leaves in a gutter. One day, to be precise Thursday 20 June 1996, I decided that this had to come to an end one way or another, either a bad end or one I couldn't really imagine. So I went to a travel agency and bought myself an air ticket to London, the way someone else might buy a rope. So now I'm sitting in this plane. In a window seat. The aisle seat is occupied by a young man in a striking pale blue suit. He's leafing through a free copy of a weekly magazine. Luckily the seat between us is unoccupied, or perhaps the flight attendants made sure it would stay empty. Because by now I weigh a hundred and seven kilos, and my thighs, stuffed into a casing of khaki fabric, are spilling under the arm-rests and on to the next seat. So no one could sit there anyway. I hate my legs. I wish they were different. It would be a lot easier visiting someone you love who doesn't love you back if you had slim legs. Not that I think they'd change his feelings for me all of a sudden, but if I had slim legs I could bear not being loved better. A female voice over the loudspeaker, backed up by a flight attendant doing a mime act, explains that in the unlikely event of a sudden loss of pressure we must pull the oxygen masks towards us like this, and fit them over our mouths and noses before helping our clumsier fellow passengers to get the rubber band over their own ears. The elegant woman in the row ahead of me is showing her elegant daughter a photo in Vogue. She's wearing an old-rose suit jacket with a green chiffon scarf. I imagine some colour consultant palmed it off on her. Her blonde hair is cut in a crazily asymmetrical style, stopping just above her ear to the left of her parting and coming down to her chin on the other side of her head. Of course the long side keeps falling into her eyes, so she has to push it back with her forefinger as she reads. Her gazelle-like daughter leans over the magazine. Behind me three loud-voiced men are discussing Paul Gascoigne. I bet they're on their way to the semi-final of the European Championship in London - England versus Germany. They're the kind of men I hate most, the kind who sit in front of the TV making faces and yelling, "Come on, shoot! Shooot!" On the other hand I like Paul Gascoigne. He reminds me of that racehorse Meteor, the steeplechaser. Meteor was remarkably overweight for a top athlete too, slow and undisciplined, but he left all the others standing. The football fans behind me are making more digs at Gascoigne. Then they laugh foolishly, agreeing with each other, so they never get to hear where the life-jackets are and how to reach the emergency exits in a hurry. In the unlikely event of our having to ditch in the English Channel they'll run the wrong way, trampling all over the elegant woman and her daughter, getting tangled up with each others' legs and blocking everyone else, while I have to sit jammed into my window seat, watching the water inexorably climb up the pane outside. We taxi to the runway, soft music coming from the ceiling, scraps of melody that are immediately blotted out again by various engine noises. It's hard to make out what the music is, but anyway it's not the kind you'd want to be the last thing you heard before dying in a plane crash. In my view 'No Milk Today' by Herman's Hermits would be about right. The Hermits start very sadly, rising to melancholy excitement as the wing catches fire, and in the middle of the most dreadful despair - strings, the whole works - you suddenly hear the pointlessly hopeful ringing of a bell. It may not sound like it, but I really like flying. I consider myself amazingly lucky to be living at the end of a century that's invented so many miraculous machines. No one in my own cultural circle would particularly envy me my air ticket or my old TV set. But a king of the Ottonian period would have given half his kingdom to be in my place. A blue and green map appears on the screen, with a little white plane moving jerkily along a dotted line running from Hamburg (marked in red) to London (also marked in red). The scraps of music die away entirely. Instead, the captain addresses us over the loudspeakers. His name is Hermann Kahr or Tahr, and before wishing us a pleasant flight Captain K. mentions the favourable wind conditions and says the temperature here in Hamburg is eighteen degrees. Well, what he actually says is: "The temperature here in Hamburg at present is eighteen degrees Celsius, but the wind chill factor makes it feel more like sixteen degrees." He's probably picked it up from TV, this silly new habit of distinguishing between the real temperature and what the wind chill factor does to it. As if everyone would feel the same to the exact degree Celsius. You could perfectly well apply the same distinction to other areas of life: statistical risk of crashing in this plane one to ten million; mind chill risk one to twenty. They calculate the statistical risk from the previous record of this airline's accidents, the safety standards of Hamburg Fuhlsbüttel and London Heathrow airports, and the fact that we have to fly over water. The mind chill risk I feel is calculated from my misgivings about the whole point of this trip, my suspicions of Fate in general, and the films I've seen. While the plane drones, gathering thrust, I run my favourite scene from Alive through my head. Alive is a film about a real-life air accident when a rugger team from Uruguay crashed in the Andes. Some of the players survived and had to stick it out for seventy days in the icy cold before they were found. They ended up shaving flesh off the frozen corpses of their fellow passengers with shards of broken glass, and then eating it. In the film one of the survivors sets out to fetch help and asks the others to leave cutting up his dead mother till last. But I'm not thinking of that scene now, I'm thinking of an earlier one, when the plane crashes into a mountainside and breaks apart in the middle. The front part races on through the air without wings, and instead of the engines all you suddenly hear is the hissing, howling airflow. The passengers, strapped in, are rigid, clinging to their seats, the skin of their faces is flapping free, their gums are bared, there's this huge gaping hole behind them and their badly stowed hand baggage whirls through the air, one by one the slipstream tears out the last rows of seats, and the real risk and the risk you feel are exactly the same. We're racing down the runway. The pale blue young man beside me is ostentatiously reading the business section of his paper. As a frequent flyer, he's trying to let us know, he's not impressed by any of this. And it probably really doesn't impress the poor guy any more. We've left the ground behind us. We're airborne. We're genuinely airborne. Twenty-eight per cent of all air accidents happen while the plane is gaining height. *** My first boyfriend was called Axel Vollauf. Axel was fair-haired and thin, with big round eyes that were always wide open, as if he'd once had to watch a massacre, or a meteorite striking, and the same expression had stayed put on his face ever since. Our love was a cheerful, unspectacular affair. We were in the same class and we walked to school in the morning hand in hand, Axel in his brown anorak and the yellow bobble hat provided by the Road Safety organization, I in a dark blue blazer with an embroidered crest on the breast pocket. The crest included my initial, an ornate A for Anne. I'd lost the Road Safety people's headscarf the day after I started school. We always met and parted at the same road junction, where we made a date for the afternoon, which we spent under a rhododendron bush in my parents' garden. I had opened an animal hospital on the mossy ground underneath the rhododendron, in dappled sun and shade. At first I ran it on my own. I was doctor and nursing staff at the same time, while Axel just watched. Then he wanted to be a doctor too, and when he was a doctor he said I had to give up one of my careers. "You can't be a nurse and a doctor," said Axel, fixing his large eyes on me. I decided to abandon the medical profession so that I could still wear my nurse's cap. It made no difference to our division of labour. I performed the operations, because they made Axel feel sick, and Axel assisted me as he had before and tidied the mossy carpet of the hospital ward. The beds were made of orange cigarette packets. We had to keep replacing them because they soon got soggy with the overnight dew and the dampness of our patients. The beds were for frogs. Barnstedt had an unusually large frog population. They hopped up from the still undeveloped water-meadows beyond the gardens and flung themselves straight into the brand-new motor-mowers chugging across the newly laid turf of our neighbours' lawns. Not a house in our street was more than five years old. People were building like crazy, creating durable assets for themselves, laying the foundations of a happy family life and keeping the grass short. They ran up debts and trusted that they and the economy would both go on getting more and more prosperous. Sometimes my mother told my brother and sister and me how the neighbours opposite had lunched on a single sausage every day for two years, so as to save money to build their house. Herr Lange ate two-thirds of the sausage and his wife ate the rest. Once my mother embarked on the story of this shared sausage she inevitably went on to telling us how our father had built our house himself. "Every brick of this house has been in your father's hands - every single brick," she said. We were the most efficient nation in the world. That's why other nations hated and envied us. The houses we built all had fences, a square glazed brick patio by the front door, and a panoramic window at the back. Small birds broke their necks flying into it. My hospital had a bed for birds too: a cigar box which I had upholstered with a handkerchief and a mattress made from a chocolate box. The frogs slept on grass. Axel and I spent most afternoons there, waiting. While we waited we listened to each other's chests, hit each other's knees with the rubber hammer, and got ready for the next operation. We set out the plastic scalpel, toy syringe and cotton wool buds on an orange-box, but the only things we actually used - a real pair of scissors and a roll of sellotape - stayed hidden in my medical bag until we needed them. I'd had to steal them from my mother's kitchen drawer because I wasn't allowed to use sharp scissors by myself yet, and sellotape was so expensive. My father lay on a garden recliner on the terrace, sleeping. He had a mysterious career which I didn't understand, and which had no proper name. At school, when we had to say what our fathers did, I didn't know. But anyway mine only had to work until early in the afternoon. Then, if the weather was fine enough, he would pick up his folding recliner, go round behind the house he had built himself, smoke Harvest 23 cigarettes and fall asleep over the Hamburg Evening News while the sun tanned him ever browner. He would begin this routine in March, putting on shorts while other people were still wearing gloves, and he followed it every afternoon and weekend of good weather, all through the spring and summer and right into the autumn. He slept lightly, a restless sleep. Like us, my father was waiting for the sound of a motor-mower. He hated motorized lawn-mowers. He hated the noise they made. The first thing you heard was an unsuccessful attempt to start the mower, the brief stuttering of an engine that immediately cut out again, and often a second and third attempt before the regular droning noise began, whereupon my father would jump up, prowl along his fence and peer over hedges, conifers and rhododendrons to see who the culprit was this time. "Weigoni," he snorted, crossing his arms. "It's in the Weigonis' garden. People aren't supposed to mow their lawns at lunch-time." Then I would put my nurse's cap on and pick up the medical bag. Axel followed me, carrying a little wicker basket. Most of the gardens had no fencing between them and the undeveloped water-meadows beyond, so we could move from neighbour to neighbour without any difficulty. Herr Weigoni knew what we wanted. He nodded to us over his droning mower as it emitted fumes, and made an inviting gesture which meant we were welcome to search the section of lawn he had just been mowing for injured frogs. We weren't allowed to walk in front of the lawn-mower and rescue the frogs first. Herr Weigoni was afraid we might get our feet caught in the blades. Axel held the basket and I put the frogs in it, frogs without arms and legs, big fat frogs with greyish intestines bulging out of their stomachs, and arms and legs without any frogs attached. When we got back to my parents' garden our basket was full and Herr Weigoni was still mowing. The smell of cut grass and petrol filled the air. By now my father had taken refuge indoors, but he came out again every ten minutes to see if the noise had stopped yet. Axel tipped our patients out on the orange-box and counted the limbs we had found. I dealt with the stomach wounds first. Since those frogs had stopped moving they were the easiest to treat. I stuffed their intestines back into the stomach cavities. "I could never do that," Axel always said in tones of mingled admiration and disgust, pulling a length of sellotape off the roll and holding it out so that I could cut it. I stuck the sellotape over the wound and put the patient in one of the orange beds. The place would burst open again at once, letting a transparent fluid seep out. Sellotape didn't stick well on the frogs' damp skins. I would put another strip over it and then pick up the next frog. The patients with amputated arms and legs were wriggling like crazy. I seldom managed to stick their limbs back on, so I just put the frogs to bed. They struggled out again at once and limped off under the rhododendron with any legs they still had. We didn't bother them any more after that, we just put their chopped-off legs, hands and feet under the bush in case the frogs wanted to come back for them later. This was the frustrating part of our hospital work: by next morning all the patients had either made their getaway or were dead. I don't remember that we ever cured a single one of them. It wasn't just my father with his lawn-mowers - all of us in our family had something we couldn't stand. My mother hated shrill female voices. More precisely, it was probably the voice of my grandmother who lived in the partly converted loft of our house that she hated. But she never said so straight out. All she said was: "Those screeching voices, I just can't bear screeching female voices. How's anyone supposed to work with that racket going on?' My granny couldn't stand the sound of the men who came into her little loft bedroom by night. She said men came up there night after night in secret, pulled her hair out, took the lids off her saucepans and banged them on her tiled kitchen walls. The most startling part of this story, perhaps, was the fact that my granny didn't have any saucepans, or any kitchen either. She didn't cook for herself at all, but ate downstairs with us. My elder sister hated the twittering of birds. When she was doing her homework, using crayons in different shades to colour in the rivers and ranges of hills on a map, or whatever other homework they gave her in Class Four, she would suddenly chuck her crayons on the floor and say crossly: "Those wretched birds! How am I expected to work? They keep screaming the whole time." My sister hated not just the twittering of birds but any kind of noise that I made myself. Personally, to this day I can't stand the sound of someone squeezing a sachet of baking powder and rubbing it until it squeaks, not that that's made a vast difference to my life. My little brother was the only member of the family who didn't hate some noise in particular. What he couldn't stand was the feel of pearl buttons. My mother always had to cut all the buttons off his pyjamas and sew up the places that were supposed to be buttoned. However, he loved coins. He had a money-box that my father had brought back from a conference in Finland. It was a small, transparent plastic globe with a key to open its base, so my brother could keep tipping out his coins and counting them. When he had saved up enough small change my father swapped it for a shiny Deutschmark, which my brother kept in a cardboard box under his bed. He used to take the box out every evening, kiss and stroke his Deutschmark, and then put it back in the cardboard box. One evening, after a long, strenuous afternoon in the frogs' hospital, I came back to the room where we children slept, hung my medical bag up on the Snow White coat-rack, and saw my little brother putting his arm through the bars of his cot and fishing about for the box with his shiny coin in it. He couldn't reach it, because when she was polishing the floor my mother had pushed it right up against the wall. My brother was five, but he still slept in a cot. He thrashed about so much in his sleep that he would have fallen out of an ordinary bed. Now he began howling. "My money, I want my money!" he bawled. My sister came in. The room belonged to all three of us, my sister, my brother and me. My sister got down flat on the floor, pushed off with her hands and slithered under his cot. She was wearing a red check dress that my mother had made from the same material as mine; the fabric slid well on the polished lino. When she emerged again she raised her chest off the floor and handed my brother the box. He took out his Deutschmark, stroked it, and then polished it with one corner of his pillow. My sister stayed on the floor, pushing and pulling herself forward, sliding all over the room on her stomach. "I'm a crocodile," she said! "Watch out! I'm a fast, dangerous crocodile." She zoomed in under my bed. We slept in a bunk bed, my sister on top and me underneath, staring up at a mattress protector with a pattern of Eskimo, Indian, African and Chinese children before I went to sleep. I heard my sister thumping about under the bed, and then she pushed herself off from the wall with her feet and shot out of the darkness again, emerging right in front of me. She was holding the shoebox where I kept my secret treasures. Before I could stop her, she opened it and took out a matchbox car. "Where did you get that? You've stolen it." "No, I haven't," I said. "Holger Deshusses gave it to me." Holger Deshusses was a boy who lived near us. No one could pronounce his family's surname properly, not even the grown-ups. We all said "Dee-sus". It had been child's play to steal that car. Easy-peasy, as we used to say. The matchbox car was a totally inconspicuous grey Opel which Holger Deshusses kept with zillions of other toy cars in a detergent drum covered with wallpaper. When Holger had gone into the bathroom with my sister, leaving me alone in his room, I had tucked the Opel into my knickers and smoothed my dress down over it. I hadn't been silly enough to take something showy, like a police car or a fire engine, or the Batmobile with the circular saw that snapped out of the radiator grille. No one would ever have noticed that the Opel was missing. "You're lying," said my sister. "I'm going to go to Holger Deshusses with you at school tomorrow and ask him. And you just watch out if you're lying!" I couldn't get to sleep for ages that evening, and I didn't feel good when I woke up in the morning either. I immediately remembered the confrontation threatening me. I hoped my sister would have forgotten the whole thing overnight, and I didn't look at her as I stood beside her in the bathroom, cleaning my teeth in slow motion and finally picking up the comb. The comb was oily with birch-water, a lotion my father used to stop his hair falling out. Only the larger teeth of the comb were anywhere near dry. I dawdled until my mother came in and helped me to wash, because my granny was waiting outside the door. When my parents built their house in the later years of the German economic miracle, they had equipped it with three children and a grandmother but only one bathroom. While my mother wiped a flannel over my outstretched arms, my sister stood on a child's chair beside me, looking at herself in the mirror. She twisted and turned at all angles, and then told me: "My bottom looks like an apple. Yours is like a milk roll." I turned my head and inspected my bottom. It looked as unattractive as I'd expected. Like a milk roll. My sister jumped down from the chair, looked sternly at me and said: "We'll be seeing Holger Deshusses soon." "I don't feel well," I told my mother. "Something hurts. A kind of a prickly feeling. Somewhere there." I pointed at my stomach. "I think I've got a temperature." My mother put her hand on my forehead. 'No, you haven't," she said, removing it. "Yes, I have!" I was almost screaming. "Feel it again!" She put her hand back on my forehead. I sent a wave of heat surging up from my stomach to my head. "Good heavens, so you have! And how! You're going straight back to bed." I dragged myself back to our room, put my nightie on again and crept under the covers, which were still warm. I watched my little brother, lying in his cot and rubbing the corner of his pillow over the place between his mouth and his nose. My sister and my mother came in, and my sister took a pair of red terry-towelling knickers off the table and put them on her apple-shaped bottom. My mother was holding a jar of Nivea Creme. She sat down on the bed beside me and dipped the end of a thermometer in the Nivea. "Turn over on your tummy!" I had a temperature of thirty-nine degrees. I concentrated hard on keeping it up until the doctor came. When he finally arrived I was absolutely exhausted by the effort. The doctor looked inside my mouth. "It's measles," he said. My mother drew the curtains. Measles meant that Holger Deshusses couldn't come into this room for days. And by then everyone would have forgotten all about the matchbox car. From now on I was safe. Not just safe from Holger Deshusses, safe for all time. Whenever anything went wrong I could simply be ill. Really ill, seriously, obviously ill - not just a slight temperature and a faked tummy-pain. I could catch measles, German measles, chicken-pox, scarlet fever, all solely by will-power. A wonderful life lay ahead of me. Because when I was ill I was in clover. Measles meant a new puzzle book, biscuits and Sunkist in bed, and a cowbell beside me. I only had to ring the bell to bring my mother running to fetch me anything else I wanted. Measles meant that the bird's next with the tiny egg which Uncle Horst had given the whole family to look at was put beside my bed. Uncle Horst was my father's elder brother, a dried-up bachelor who lived "off the Social Security" in a tiny wooden house on an allotment complex. Visits to him were always boring. He had no radio or television. My father had to write out his lottery ticket for him, and every time Uncle Horst said: "What a daft set of numbers, nobody would ever think of them!" However, he was very glad of the cigarettes my father brought him, and he used to give me the empty packets from last time. Sometimes we sat outside in the allotment garden, and Uncle Horst told us what the birdsongs were. "Listen, that's a coal-tit - twit-tweet twit-tweet. And there's a blue-tit - twee-twee-too-too-too." He imitated the birds very badly, as if he were reading out their cries from one of his bird-books. When we left he always had a present for us: a big fir-cone, the bone of a deer, a mummified toad (my mother threw that one in the garbage as soon as we were home), and last time the bird's nest, which was placed beside my sickbed. The measles also meant that Axel, who had already had them, came visiting and brought me a bunch of parrot tulips splashed with red and yellow. Parrot tulips are the most beautiful flowers in the world, the true flowers of love. But since most people don't know anything about love they buy red roses instead. My mother put the parrot tulips in a vase and stood them on the child's chair where the nest had been before. It had been taken away again because I'd tried to hatch the egg out. It broke, and I'd got yolk and the tiny bird embryo all over my pyjamas. Axel sat down on the edge of my bed and took two rubber animals the size of five-pfennig pieces out of his trouser pocket. He knew I collected rubber animals. "Oh, great - the giant squid!" I said, holding it up to the light. The giant squid was black and curiously two-dimensional,, which made it look even scarier. "And the sheep," said Axel. I hadn't got the sheep yet either. Axel visited me every day. He persuaded my mother to bring the music centre up from the living-room to the children's bedroom and let us have an album full of singles. The music centre was a rectangular wooden box on thin splayed legs. Its round loudspeaker was hidden behind a kind of woven mat, but you could feel it, and the graduated radio frequencies glowed green. One of my parents' photograph albums contains a picture of my father with a small sombrero on the back of his head, sitting in front of this music centre and holding a record in his fingertips. He's smiling at the camera, and his hair - still much thicker at that time - was shiny with the birch-water. My mother is standing behind him and slightly to one side, with her arms already held at an angle as if she were about to launch into a dance. She's wearing Capri pants and a roll-neck sweater, and she looks stunning. The strange young man with his arm round her shoulders evidently thinks too. They're having a pretty good party, all of them relaxed and fooling around. They really seem to be having fun. The photo dates from when my parents were already married but didn't have any children yet. Axel took six singles out of the album, stacked them on the spindle of the changer in the middle of the turntable, and put the arm of the player over them. The music centre worked by letting one disk drop and playing it, after which the next dropped on top of the first, so we could listen to all of them one by one without interruption. Then we discussed which we liked best and played it again. Our first winner was Bill Ramsey's "Pigalle", second time round we chose "Banjo Boy" sung by Jan and Kjeld from the Netherlands, and the third time it was "Café Oriental", with Bill Ramsey again. Bill Ramsey was the tops anyway. Sometimes my brother and sister joined us listening to the hit parade. My mother said they might just as well catch my measles so that we could get it over with "in one fell swoop". But I liked it better when Axel and I were deciding on the winner by ourselves. We nearly always felt the same. When I was better we went back to spending our afternoons under the rhododendron. My father sometimes took us and my brother and sister to the nearby pool. He always warned us never to jump into "unknown waters", and specially not to dive in head first. "Always make sure how deep the water is before you jump in," he said. "The Boberg hospital is full of people who dived into shallow water. Paraplegics now, all of them." It was the summer when the Americans landed on the moon, and I remember the whole family sitting in the living-room with the curtains drawn, even though the sun was shining outside. Usually my brother and sister and I tried in vain to get permission to watch TV on sunny afternoons. My father was seeing the whole thing for the second time round. The television picture looked grainy. Sometimes it twitched, like when my father tried tuning in to East German TV. An astronaut climbed very slowly down a ladder in his white suit. Then the picture froze and someone explained something, and then you saw information charts that I didn't understand. I didn't think it was particularly exciting. I was only seven, so most things were new to me, even my parents' fifties disks. I'd only just learned at school that there was a God who was responsible for everything. No one at home had mentioned it. I accepted God's existence as I accepted the existence of aircraft, telephones and running hot water. I think seven is an age when you can't afford to be over-impressed by new experiences. What really upset me was that our teacher said animals had no souls. I liked animals. Animals were Professor Grzimek's little friends that he brought into the TV studio with him. Funny monkeys, or thin cheetahs that never kept still, and as a special treat I was allowed to stay up after eight o'clock to watch them. I didn't see why they shouldn't have souls. I took no interest in space flight until the Shell filling stations began giving away medallions. You collected them and fitted them into sockets on a card. The card showed the rocket that had put Apollo 11 into orbit round the moon, with a caption over it saying: "The Conquest of the Sky". Every time my father filled the car up he got a little envelope with a medallion in it. He really brought the medallions home for my brother, but my brother sold them to me for ten pfennigs each, and I collected them instead. It was my first serious collection, by which I mean that I wanted the whole set. When I collected the rubber animals I was only aiming to get a lot of them, as many dangerous and unusual animals as possible. In the end I was short of only two in the medallion collection, Apollo 8 and J. Alcock. On the other hand I had three Charles A. Lindberghs. I had to buy the medallions from my brother sight unseen every time. He opened the envelopes himself in advance, but he didn't let me look inside until I'd paid. I never did get the two I still needed. The series was discontinued, and I couldn't swap with Axel, who had begun a Shell medallions collection at the same time out of loyalty to me, because by then we weren't friends any more. As the year went on it got too cold to go swimming, the animal hospital had been obliged to close down for lack of patients, and Axel and I played indoors. Oddly enough, we almost always played at my house. It was very unusual for us to go round to Axel's, although there would have been much more space there. He was an only child. Instead, we quarrelled so fiercely with my brother and sister for space in the room I shared with them that my mother finally told us to build Lego partitions, which we used to divide the floor of the room into three large sections. Crossing anti-sibling ramparts a few centimetres high always caused a lot of loud shouting. But it wasn't these arguments that set my family against Axel - the opposite, if anything. I don't remember just how it began, but at some point Axel developed the unattractive habit of flinging himself unexpectedly at people. At first he only did it to me. He would attack me at least twice a day, clinging tightly to my neck until I was breathless. It got on my nerves. But I put up with it because I was fond of him, and waited for him to let go of his own accord. Then he started rushing at my sister and my mother too, flinging his arms round their waists, hanging on tight and pressing his head against their hips, and he could be shaken off only by force. My sister in particular hated it. "Stop it, you idiot," she shouted, hitting him on the head with her fist, "stop it this minute!" Which only made Alex cling even tighter. Even my mother was delivered up more or less helpless to his attacks. "If you don't stop this you can't come here any more," she told Axel one day, after detaching his arms from her hips with difficulty. Axel opened his big eyes even wider, rushed straight at one of her legs and clutched it so fiercely that my mother almost fell over. That evening she had a private word with me. "Look, tell your friend Axel to stop it. It's getting to be too much. Every time I set eyes on him I'm afraid he'll rush me. I hardly dare turn my back on him." But however cautiously you broached the subject to Axel, the only result was that he silently widened his eyes and rushed at you again. By now he was hanging round my neck at least five times a day, and it was with less and less enthusiasm that I saw him turn up earlier and earlier. One day we were just sitting down to lunch when the doorbell rang. All eyes were immediately turned reproachfully on me, and my father, who always came home from work about one-thirty and therefore had lunch with us, said, "Oh God, it's Saucer-Eyes! Already!" "Let's just not open the door," suggested my mother, serving out the chops. Her husband got a whole chop and her mother-in-law and children half a chop each. She herself ate only vegetables and potatoes. She said she didn't specially like meat. The doorbell rang again. "It's that lad. That wild little lad's here again," said my granny in her high-pitched voice. When Axel turned up she usually took refuge in her room in the loft, although he hadn't attacked her yet. "Does he have to come every day?" asked my sister. Only my little brother crowed happily: "Saucer-Eyes! Saucer-Eyes!" and spilled his canned peas on the Formica table-top. "Ssh," said my mother, and then turned to my father. "Don't keep calling him Saucer-Eyes. The children will copy you." My granny took a damp dishcloth out of her smock pocket and swept the peas up with it. The cloth was made of greyish-brown fabric, and you didn't have to put your nose especially close to notice its revolting smell. My sister always called it "the Plague cloth". After the Plague cloth had wiped anything it smelled as revolting as the dishcloth itself. My granny carefully wrapped the peas in the cloth and put it back in the pocket of her green and orange flowered smock. Axel was now ringing the bell frantically. My sister tried to swap her half chop for mine, because I had the bit with the bone, but I noticed in time and pushed my plate away from her, sending another tidal wave of peas over the table. "Oh, for heaven's sake, what are you two doing? You'll have to go and eat your lunch in the lavatory!" cried my mother through the ringing of the doorbell. She was always making this threat, but she never put it into practice. I didn't think the idea of eating alone in the lavatory was so bad. My granny took the Plague cloth out again and gathered up more peas to rot away in her smock. Then the ringing stopped, my mother smiled with relief, and we enjoyed the silence for a moment. I stuck my feet behind the legs of my chair, and we began eating. All of a sudden my father, who could see into the garden from where he was sitting, choked and waved his fork in that direction, coughing. We all turned our heads to the panoramic window. There stood Axel Vollauf, pressing his face to the glass and goggling in at us with eyes the size of mill-wheels. I quickly turned away again and pretended to be studying the canned vegetables on my plate. "Oh, let him in before he smears the whole window up," sighed my mother. My sister punched me on the arm and hissed, "Go on, get up! It's you Saucer-Eyes wants to see." "Saucer-Eyes, Saucer-Eyes!" crowed my little brother. Many, many years later my therapist told me about an educational ruse apparently employed by the Eskimos to teach their children to keep away from the dangerous edge of the ice. As soon as an Eskimo child is at all capable of reasoning, the whole village comes together. The child's mother or father says: "Now then, go over to the edge of the ice where the open sea begins." The child marches off before all eyes, feeling flattered by everyone's sudden attention. But no sooner does he or she reach the danger zone than all the Eskimos begin laughing. The child stops, looks round in confusion, maybe hesitates, wondering whether to laugh too or not. But then he realizes that he has fallen for a trick, and all the others are laughing at his stupidity. So he stands there on the edge of the ice, crying, and the others never stop laughing until the child has left the dangerous area again. My therapist claimed that once humiliated like that an Eskimo child never willingly goes near the edge of the ice again, and said that this kind of education works better than any stern prohibition. I don't know if this tale is true. It could be just another story thought up by the kind of people who believe that other races have a better fundamental grasp of the meaning of life. Perhaps the Eskimos really all just sit around playing bingo while their children chuck themselves into the Arctic Ocean by the dozen. As for the method itself, however, I haven't the slightest doubt that it works.