Chernobyl

The weather was unbelievably beautiful that late spring. I hadn’t realised it could be like that in Germany; hot blue skies and endless sunshine. Even the grim little industrial town I was teaching in seemed less ugly.

Most of the disadvantages of living there had melted away by then. The other residents in my pretty art nouveau building had given up trying to make me take part in their treppenhaus thing. When they’d first knocked on my door one Saturday soon after moving in I hadn’t had a clue what they were talking about. I didn’t know the German for “explain as much as you like, I am still not going to understand what you’re saying”. “Ich habe keine deutsche” didn’t seem to work. I tried “enshuldigung” and a polite shrug. That didn’t work either. Eventually I just shut the door and hoped John would get home soon.

It turned out that everyone had to take a turn at cleaning the communal area of the building and that weekend it was supposed to be mine. “I’m not fucking doing that” I said to John when he explained. The only flats I’d ever lived in before had been in the South of France and Hackney – a giant tower block where it seemed more likely from the smell that there was a rota for pissing in the lift, although no one had ever asked me to join it.

I’d got over the endless bureaucracy of that country. Each time someone moved into a new area it was required that they register their details. I was outraged at the intrusion. Poor John; I have no idea why he put up with me for so long. He’d had to come along to translate and we’d been sitting there for hours – me getting crosser and crosser and him doing his best not to antagonise the officials there.

The number of questions and form filling seemed endless and the interview was a farce. It was lucky the official had no English, so he didn’t understand John’s tactful filter as he translated my insults “ tell him I am really fucking pissed off with waiting this long and that if this carries on I am going to punch his spotty face.” “She would like to know if the delay will last much longer.”

Can you tell I didn’t exactly love living in Germany? I think a fairly big part of it was my fault. I knew only a few joke phrases my friend Reiner had taught me when I arrived. No understanding of the grammar to start with; nothing else really either.

In my normal day-to-day existence as an English teacher, that didn’t matter. I spoke English at work, most of my friends were other English teachers – that strange little bubble of expats that forms in foreign countries – and my friends who were German mostly spoke perfect English so there was no real incentive to learn the language.

Soon after arriving I was stalked by a man late one night, coming out of a railway station up a deserted little alleyway. I realised I didn’t even know how to shout help at that point. I looked it up the minute I got home.

Sometimes it didn’t matter. I once sat next to an old lady on a bus for at least half an hour and lasted the whole journey with her having no idea that I couldn’t understand what she was saying to me. I just guessed what it could be from the inflections in her voice – all old ladies talk about the same things on buses the world over – weather, ticket prices, lateness of buses – and I agreed with her whenever it seemed as if she had paused for an answer. It worked perfectly – she never cottoned on.

I am trying really hard to think of something nice about Duisburg. My flat was lovely – it had been passed on to me by some German friends who were moving to the States and it was a protected tenancy of some kind. It cost almost nothing to rent, and the rooms were big, high-ceilinged, turn of the century, with ornate features. My friends had left all their furniture there too. There was a huge bed about seven feet off the ground, built from stolen telegraph poles, a lovely little wrought iron balcony, and big windows. It was fun driving past the steel works that ringed the town at night. Sometimes they would emit huge glowing red clouds of something that lit up the sky in an exciting way.

I liked some of the alternative German lifestyle. I used to go to an anarchist hairdresser where you paid what you could afford, and there was a wonderful vintage shop where the cost of the clothes was worked out according to weight – so you could buy vintage silk dresses and lace for almost nothing. There was a great little independent cinema in a kind of garage where you could take drinks in while you watched the films.

The Germans my age were mostly fun – the older ones were stodgy and weird. They wore big shouldered leather jackets, and on Sundays when everything was shut they would stroll around the town centre, stopping to look in butchers’ shop windows. That was very odd.

Apart from the teachers, there was a sizeable British presence in the nearby city where there was a big army base. We often went drinking there and I disliked the squaddies. They were horrible to the German girls when they got drunk, and although I understood it must have been really boring for them, stuck there at eighteen with nothing to do, it embarrassed me to see them crowding out the bars, insulting the local people. I hated it when I sometimes got mistaken for a German, although I did enjoy the looks on their faces when they realised I was definitely not a local, and could tell them to fuck off just as fluently as they could make comments about my body.

By the springtime I was used to all that. I was bureaucratically in order, I liked my students at the big Krupp factory where I worked, and the people in my building had given up asking me to do their treppenhaus. The endless snow had melted, and I no longer had to slide my way to work in the stupid high heels I was supposed to wear. Best of all, I’d also recently decided that I would really like to have a baby and I had an idea I might be pregnant. I was half excited and half terrified at the thought.

Then one beautiful morning, listening to the World Service, I heard a report that Sweden had noticed something unusual coming from the Ukraine, in the Soviet Union. It took a few days for anything more definite to filter out. There’d been an explosion of some kind in a nuclear plant, and a cloud was spreading slowly over Europe. We weren’t that near – we were in the Ruhr Valley, but we were near enough to worry. It unnerved me that no one seemed to know exactly what had happened, and what the implications would be.

We had to listen to the appallingly bad BFBS radio station – the one set up for the British Forces in Europe. It was awful – full of programmes that tried to please too many people, playing rubbish music interspersed with little messages and requests from families back home. The World Service was better, even though it did feel as if I had stepped back into the 1940s whenever I switched over, but it wasn’t local enough to get any information about how we were being affected in Germany.

The BFBS wasn’t very helpful. Suddenly the DJs’ voices took on a new reassuring tone – worrying in itself, saying there was absolutely no problem for anybody. The next day, the jaunty announcer said that although there was nothing to give any cause for concern, we shouldn’t hang our washing out, or eat things grown in our gardens, and possibly if it rained, we should all go indoors as quickly as we could, but there was no need to panic about anything.

That was when one of my American friends really got scared and took the next flight back to San Francisco. It was so obvious that no one really knew what was happening and I hated the patronising tone of the radio station assuming that people would accept their obvious lies.

The strangest thing of all was leaning out over the edge of my little ornate balcony, looking up at the bright blue sky, feeling the gentle breeze on my face and wondering how such idyllic weather could bring something so harmful and frightening. I put my hand on my stomach, imagining little cells dividing inside me, and then I stepped back inside, closed the doors, and turned the radio back on.