Those Creative Types

When my host family picked me up from the train station in Dresden they handed me a grey and black teddy bear, Albert, and a bunch of flowers. They stood in an uncertain posse, as if for a family picture but without the good clothes to make them stand up straight. On the left was Gunter, my host father, his face red and acne scarred so I looked away quickly in case he thought I was staring. Thea, his wife, was a slip of a woman. She giggled a girlish laugh which made me take a step towards her, thinking, maybe she’s the one I should hug. She stopped laughing. I dropped my arms.

Next to her was Christoph, my brand new seven year old brother. He was skipping from foot to foot and seemed the only one genuinely glad to see me, or maybe he was the only one un-self-conscious enough to show it. He smiled and said over and over to himself, “Austraaaalien, Austraaaaaalien!” Thea draped her arms over his shoulders. Hannes, my tall, gangling 15 year old host brother was so fair in both skin and hair I thought at first he might be albino and looked quickly away from him too, to Anne, upon whom much of my hopes and fears were pinned: Anne, 16, to be my first ever younger sister. Her face had the pinched nose and slightly Slavic eyes of many German girls, and the spiky fringe and bobbed back hair cut that was my first ever cool haircut back when I was 13. She had inherited her mother’s art of understatement: she gave me a kiss on the cheek and took my bag from my hand. Gunter took the other one.

We walked to their station wagon, a Volkswagen Golf, in a silence as suffocating as a woollen jumper too tight to get over your head without wriggling. Like a cyclone that had made its way to the east coast of Queensland, Australia, where I was from), finally and suddenly letting its ponderous clouds loose the rain it had bundled up for weeks, it hit me that I really, really couldn’t speak any German. I had learned a little in junior high school but that had been a couple of years ago and all I could remember was “Ich heisse Jackie,” and “Wo ist die Toilette?” both of which I could use with my host family a grand total of once before they lost their value, although I could probably stagger out “Wo ist die Toilette?” with each of them as long as one didn’t overhear me asking another and as long as their place was big enough to allow me to forget. Furthermore, they really couldn’t speak any English: Anne and Hannes were learning it in school but it is one thing to practise phrases out loud amongst German classmates and quite another to use it as if you are trying to actually communicate something as complicated as “We come in peace.”

Once in the car, a familiar environment, they started to relax a little. Christoph was the first to relieve the silence. He said loudly and slowly, “Ich heisse Christoph. Wir wohnen auf Charlottenstrasse.” He was making fun of me, and Thea clipped him on the ear and told him to hush. But I was grateful: it was the first thing anyone had said that I had understood.

They lived in an apartment on the grounds of an ancient (to my untrained, Australian eye, a Western civilisation younger than the wooden table in the foyer of my new home) waterworks. The flat was tiny: a kitchen, a living room and three bedrooms. So much for asking where the loo was more than once: it opened directly off the foyer and I was pointed toward it with everyone present as soon as we walked in. Anne was to share her room with me. I never heard her complain once about that although if I were her I would have.

At dinner that night, they carried the kitchen table from the kitchen into the foyer and I learned that they did this every night so they could all sit around it and eat together. This seemed both quaint and terrifying to me: it was a completely foreign routine in a world of completely foreign things, and although not very big in and of itself, it brought home to me the reality that I wasn’t going home any time soon: not for another ten months, three weeks and six days. I had in fact always wanted a family that sat around a table and ate meals together, a place where the tv was off more than it was on and more than anything, a mother closer to my own age and a younger sister who might, I don’t know, understand. Now I realised what I had really wanted was a more perfect version of my own family, not a different one altogether.

At dinner, Gunter cleared his throat and you could tell he had prepared something special. “How are you, Jackie?” he asked in his bass voice, a sonar rumble from the depths of the rock his craggy face had been carved from. “Was your trip good?” Each word was enunciated and he said my name the way that everyone said my name, but as it was early days I was still getting used to it, “Checkie.” Like I was a pet dog. Hannes and Anne sniggered, and Gunter looked a little crestfallen. Unlike his children, he had never learned English in school, instead taking Russian for eight years in what was then the DDR, East Germany. It occurred to me that maybe they had hoped for someone who could speak at least a little German, the way I had hoped for people who would fall in love with me on sight. I wanted to crawl under the table and produce the person they wanted to live with for a year, not this bespectacled, frightened, half Asian midget who couldn’t speak in any language, her throat was so swollen from trying not to cry. You’d think that I would at least not be treating them like kidnappers, seeing as I had signed up for this student exchange in a calculated moment of independence.  I had absolutely wanted to come; had fought with my mother tooth and nail to get permission; and now here I was, with nowhere else to go.

I guess they decided to buck up; like the East Germans they were, they had seen a lot worse than me come into their lives (secret police, rations, curtailment of freedom of speech, for example). Besides, there were still multiple activities to try me out on and the language, they assumed, would come. Helping me learn it might even be fun, they probably decided in their upbeat moments. And so it was decided that a perfect way to bond was for me to go swimming with them.

The family went swimming training twice a week. Now I felt bad about having written in my application that I liked playing soccer – it made me seem far sportier than I actually was, when in fact I had only written it to seem more well-rounded and therefore able to get a scholarship to go, and because it was something I knew how to write in German.  As luck would have it, there had been a New Zealand exchange student staying with one of the other families in the swimming squad for the past year and she could swim, if not like a dolphin, at least like someone who had been in the water more than just to wash. New Zealand was close to Australia, right? Whatever my linguistic shortcomings, my country was ringed by oceans. It seemed natural and obvious that I would be able to use the pool like a second home.

I stood on the diving block, thinking how deep and blue the water appeared. “Go on,” shouted Thea encouragingly. She leapt in and started doing laps. I prayed, in that moment before jumping in, that I would be able to swim better than I had ever been able to swim in my life. I had a wild premonition that maybe, just maybe I had been able to swim all these years and just hadn’t had the chance to demonstrate it. Suddenly the lack of an in-ground pool at my house in Australia was ominously symbolic of my family’s general unimaginativeness and all the things I had been fighting to break free from when I signed up for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Right there, right then in a swimming hall in Germany I had my first big chance to let my true, natural, water-baby self shine through. I took a deep breath of chlorinated air and, my feet coming apart only slightly in the dive, I swam.

After about twenty metres I stopped and clung, shivering, to the rope. Here was a self-evident truth and it was time to face it: I really, really sucked at swimming. Looking around however, it became clear that the only way out of the pool was to keep going. I pushed off, flailing my arms around in the windmill I thought might best resemble and therefore have the same propellent qualities as freestyle. As I “swam” the only other time I had been asked to swim in a fifty metre pool came back to me with the garish clarity of memories that flash before your eyes just before you faint or die.

I had been in grade four and it was the annual, compulsory school swimming competition. As weaker swimmers, I and a boy in my class, Jacob, had our own special race, breadthwise instead of lengthwise, across the pool. We were given Styrofoam boards to help us out so we didn’t even have to use our arms, just kick our way to getting it over and done with for another year. I felt confident: even though I wasn’t a great swimmer, I was sure I could take this guy. He was pale to my easily tanned Eurasian skin and what’s more, he looked more scared than I did. I felt a ribbon coming on for my team, and a ribbon won in the cross-pool race was still a ribbon, just as sports like badminton and synchronised swimming can contribute to your country’s overall medal tally.

The whistle blew and we jumped (I can’t really save dived) in. I was halfway across the pool and raising my head for air when there was a gigantic splash next to me. Suddenly there was an octopus, thrashing around and grabbing me from both sides. I struggled, smacking my board at it and trying to get away to realise my dream – I had never won anything for my team before (except in maths Olympiads, but this was to make up for that). To no avail: I was soon dragged over to the side of the pool and left to hold on to the railing while my bedraggled grade four teacher, Mr Kelleher, emerged next to me, spluttering but triumphant. He had thought that, only four or five arm lengths from victory, I had started to go down.

I couldn’t believe it. I grabbd my board back from Mr Kelleher and did the only thing any self-respecting seven year old in my position would have done: I pushed off from the side of the pool and kicked my stumpy little legs until I had finished the race. I got a ribbon for my gesture, second place, and the applause from my team seemed genuine. But I knew they were only clapping because they thought I had survived death and they were in slight awe of that; and I also knew that, as soon as the bus ride back to the school was over, my ignominious glory would be gradually eroded until all I could hope for would be, at best, sympathetic but jeering smiles. I was the girl who couldn’t even make it across the pool breadthwise without needing to be saved.

As I raised my head, ten years and three thousand miles away to gasp for air and catch sight of the blurry line of the other end of the Olympic sized ocean I had flung myself into, I knew that I was still that girl. But only in terms of swimming skill: this time there was no one to try to rescue me. I gritted my teeth and flubbered on in an exercise in private heroism.

I held on to the edge of the pool and blinked around triumphantly. My host sister, Anne, glided up in the lane next to me. I knew it was her because even in the pool she had a characteristic “That’s Life” turn to her head and I think she may have smiled encouragingly. I don’t think she ever laughed about me with her friends, and for that she has my eternal respect.

At the next swimming training session, the coach of the squad took me and Thea aside. There was an exchange in German too rapid for me to understand but it became pretty clear what was going on when I was directed into the pool with Christoph and the other youngsters. Christoph, bless him, was not too old for this to be uncool. In fact, I was a hit with him and all his mates: the novelty of having an Australian host sister was always going to beat whatever anyone else decided to bring for show and tell that year, and he had me on tap. When I got into the pool, the lovely little blighter even yelled out, “Yay!” and was as excited as a puppy when I took up my Styrofoam board and started kicking up and down the lane behind him.

When we got home that night I joined the family in the living room  where they were watching a bit of television before bed. I felt tired but not too embarrassed about being lumped in with the infants: this was who I was, after all, not some distant relative of Kieran Perkins. I was in a country where the only kind of sport I knew about, cricket (and even then only to talk about) was not even played. My intellectual achievements were utterly meaningless ways to get people to like or respect me when I couldn’t even say, “Can I use the shower instead of the bath?” (I had practised it, after working out what it should be from my German dictionary, but my host mother had to come into the bathroom and watch me ape showering with the shower hose rather than filling the bathtub. She understood and I got permission, but after a few nights of getting water all over the bathroom (the shower hose was just a fixture above the bathtub, with no curtain or other shielding device) she asked me politely if I would mind changing back. I did mind, but I did change back).

 So this is who I was, and just that night I wasn’t going to feel challenged about it. Like it or lump it: they had me for a year. I’d go to swimming training, but in my head I knew that was all I was going to promise: damned if I was going to become the new women’s champion in breaststroke to impress people who weren’t even my real parents. I pulled out my basic German textbook and started reading one of Christoph’s Asterix books, although I secretly carried an English copy of Great Expectations in my lap and stole glances at it when no one was looking.

Gunter went rummaging behind the couch and emerged with a file. He thumbed through it, and then shouted out, “Hier! Guck mal hier, Checkie!” Reluctantly I looked up. Even I had figured out that “Guck mal hier” meant “Look here.” “It says here,” he went on in German, “that you play soccer and all kinds of sport. See?” He looked at me, waiting for a response. All I could do was feign interest and read over his shoulder as if someone else had written what was there in my very own handwriting. Finally I raised my head and caught him, looking from the page to me, and then back at the page.

I tried to think of how to translate, “When I wrote ‘I like soccer,’ all I meant is that I enjoy kicking a ball around occasionally in the yard. Not that I was on the State team. But don’t worry, I read a mean classic novel and you should see me do a chemistry equation. Maths, the universal language, baby.” I sighed. I had been in Germany two weeks. I was doing well to have asked that morning for salami instead of raw mince in my school sandwich. So I did what I had been doing all week and which I was beginning to see might stand me in good stead for the rest of my life (or at least well into my early twenties) in a variety of uncomfortable situations in response to questions I did not know the answer to: I shrugged, and smiled, and felt the muscle in my right cheek ache from the strain of pulling upwards all day at ordinary people who I was afraid of. Then I left Gunter comparing the promise on the page to me, a slightly overweight girl who looked nothing like the Australians in the pictures he had no doubt seen, wearing swimsuits on the beach or roughing it in the great outdoors. I came from suburban Brisbane. We lived at least an hour’s drive from the coast and the closest I had ever been to camping was a caravan trip, three hours away to Hastings Point. We had hired a powered site and my dad had said, “This is the life,” and meant it.

I pushed Asterix to one side and started reading Great Expectations openly, staging my own quiet rebellion by immersing myself in the adventures of Pip in the dirty city of London, told entirely in English. As I read, I tried to let the soothing phrases of sentences I could understand run like water through my brain, loosening the grip of the dream that had taken a hold on my mind strong enough to drive me all the way from Brisbane, Australia to Dresden, Germany: that I would find my real soul-family on this, the other side of the planet, who would love me for no reason at all.