LITMIR.BIZ

       5

      I shower in the kitchen. Not because I want to shower in the kitchen, but for the simple reason that the shower is behind a little wall in the kitchen. That’s how it is in most of the Altbau flats in Vienna. You always find the kitchen, bathroom and toilet in the most unexpected places. In the building where Claire from Berlitz lives, in the sixteenth district, the unheated toilet is in the corridor and she has to share it with her neighbours.

      When I’m showered and dressed I go to work, even though it’s the weekend. I’m one of the few teachers who always agrees to teach on Saturdays. It’s not like I have anything else to do. Today I’ll be teaching a group of 10-year-olds who’ve had the misfortune of being born to ambitious parents.

      ‘Saturday is shell day,’ a little girl says to me cryptically before taking some shells out of her bag.

      I’ve never taught this group before, so I have no idea why ‘Saturday is shell day’. For the rest of the lesson, the shells lie there on the table like a worrying reminder that I probably should have made a bit of an effort to find out what the class have done in previous lessons. But in spite of the shells, the four 10-year-olds are a joy to teach. When they’ve been corrected once, they never make the same mistake again, whether it’s vocabulary, grammar or syntax – in contrast to my adult students. We play the memory game, read stories about sharks who eat people and make up our own versions of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’.

      ‘What do your parents do?’ I ask.

      The children stare at me.

      ‘What jobs do they do?’ I clarify.

      The children look relieved and carry on colouring in pictures of dinosaurs with the felt-tips I brought from home.

      ‘My mum is a doctor,’ says one boy.

      ‘My dad works as a professor,’ the shell girl says. ‘In the university.’

      ‘Right,’ I say, slipping in a small correction. ‘At the university? How interesting.’

      ‘At the university,’ the girl says and goes back to colouring her triceratops purple.

      ‘My dad travels a lot. To Japan. And Singapore. And Hong Kong. I get presents. My mum stays at home,’ says the next boy.

      Of course it’s only businessmen, doctors and other highly educated people who can afford to pay for private lessons here. I turn to the last boy.

      ‘And what do your mum and dad do?’ I ask.

      Dismayed, the boy stares at me.

      ‘They write books,’ he says at last.

      ‘What are the books about?’ I ask.

      The boy hides his face behind his hands before crying: ‘About love!’

      I try to conceal my smile and change the subject so the boy can recover. The children’s natural curiosity, honesty and joy make me forget to count the minutes until the lesson finishes, and when it’s time for them to go we’re all sad. A few seconds later they run out of the room and I know I’ve already become a distant memory to them.

      Since Rebecca is at Jakob’s parents’ place the whole weekend and Leonore’s rehearsing, there’s half a Saturday and a whole Sunday still to fill. In my head I’ve made a schedule of jolly little activities. I walk slowly to the first district and look in the windows of the exclusive boutiques. I count the number of women wearing real-fur coats on Kohlmarkt (four) and the number of dark-skinned people (one, selling Die Presse) I can see in under a minute. On the wide, pedestrianised street called Graben I see three young women doing market research for Samsonite. I slow my pace and peer into the Persian-rug shop alongside them. When one of the women asks if I would be interested in answering some questions, I feign surprise, then nod and grin.

      ‘Do you own a suitcase with wheels?’ the woman asks in German.

      ‘Yes I do,’ I reply.

      The woman puts a little cross by one of the rows on her sheet of paper.

      ‘Do you own more than one suitcase with wheels?’

      ‘No I don’t.’

      ‘Do you know the brand of the suitcase you own?’ asks the woman.

      ‘No, sorry,’ I reply and smile widely.

      I love taking part in market-research surveys. And filling out questionnaires. The knowledge that my life can be divided up into simple categories relating to how much I earn, what kind of place I live in and how many foreign holidays I take a year gives me a sense of security and satisfaction. The fact that there are no grey zones, that everything really can be broken down into black and white. Once, after I’d had a particularly difficult student at Berlitz, I went into the nearest bank and filled in a withdrawal slip just to calm myself down.

      ‘Thank you very much,’ says the woman. ‘Have a nice day.’

      ‘Was that all?’ I say, trying to hide the desperation in my voice.

      But the girl has already approached another couple.

      I go to one of the few cinemas in Vienna that shows films in their original language. The film doesn’t start for another hour and a half so I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in the foyer, and realise I’m in the wrong European city for becoming an author. I should immediately move to Paris, drink cheap red wine and spend all my time wandering around hungry. After the film I rent a DVD on the way home, and buy some food.

      On Sunday I try to sleep in, but fail. Instead, Optimus and I lie in bed and stare at one another. I go to a Kokoschka exhibition in the Museum Quarter and then the cinema again. I eat dinner at McDonald’s and hope none of my students will see me. I make a constant effort not to look at the time to see how many hours I have to endure before I can go to bed and begin my working week again.

      While I’m eating my Big Mac I start thinking about how I ought to write a historical novel set in England. It would be about a young orphan girl who becomes a governess at a big spooky mansion. Slowly, she and the dour master of the house fall in love, but there’s a big twist: the master’s wife is still alive – locked up because she’s batshit crazy. Locked in the attic! Once again, the hairs on my arms stand on end when I think what an incredible story it’s going to be.