By Rachael Brown
This month the Dispatch is from Rachael Brown, who narrates a humorous tale of learning German and how this can bring an extra level of stress to those tricky everyday occasions that are always funnier when you are not living through them.
Dinner with the in-laws, that age-old anxiety, is the cardiac event that occurs the moment a partner announces a Pizza Express voucher or that they have purchased something from Lakeland:
“I keep saying we should have them round. Now we can use the…”
[Tagine], [Spiraliser], [Ravioli attachment for the pasta-maker I bought with my ex, just before he had that unrelated nervous breakdown.]
It is a night of hypertension, an evening when skills you mastered during infancy suddenly require a lot more thought than they did before. For instance, where to put your hands when not in use, locating the hole in the middle of your face, not setting your hair on fire (tried and tested), or standing up from beneath a tablecloth and taking it with you in a wildly inappropriate parody of your future wedding to the offspring of said in-laws.
In short – a minefield.
But what about when that dinner isn’t in your first language?
My partner and I have been together for three years, long-distance (UK-Germany), so I suppose that’s one and a half years in real time. Two weeks ago, we met up with Valentin’s extended family, who were holidaying in Konstanz, Baden-Württemberg. This would mean dinner in my third language. (I never learnt German at school and can just about carry a conversation in French.)
They were waiting in the courtyard of the restaurant when we arrived, smart in a kind of effortless, European way. We sat down. I was going for nonchalance, but none of my limbs seemed to look normal where I placed them, sort of like when you put a puppet down for a moment.
We made the usual greetings and I went through the back catalogue of phrase book classics – the ones I know I’m not going to screw up: “How are you?” “What have you been doing today?” “It’s nice to see you.”
It was going surprisingly well; I hadn’t dropped anything or set myself on fire. On looking through the menu, someone realised the vegetarian dishes were on the specials list. A waiter came over to explain. Knowing my chance of remaining vegetarian relied on understanding something of this, I felt myself lean into the machine-gun fire of “Pilze,” “Salbei” and “Muscheln.” His words were definitely muschelled. Staring into his soul, and mouthing to myself, I assume the waiter thought we were there for pre-exorcism spaghetti.
You’re a different version of yourself when you’re not speaking in your mother tongue. Something I’m finding more and more challenging, the further this relationship goes. Comparing myself to my personality in German is like comparing a MacBook Pro to the old Dell banger you keep resurrecting, the one that wheezes when you open too many tabs, responds to commands 30 seconds too late and has a severely reduced processing speed.
Valentin sits down at the table, and with a dull thump and a rising cloud of dust from my filter, I join him, simultaneously ejecting my disk drive, which sticks, and remains ejected for the duration of the meal. Undercutting the birdsong and low-voiced conversation, I buzz with the overload of translating a six-person conversation.
I find myself identifying with Sherlock from the BBC adaptation. To search for the meaning of his clues, Sherlock returns to his “Mind Palace”, a mental space where he stores every word and meaning he has ever learnt. I quite like the idea of a Mind Shed, somewhere dark and musty, something full of crap.
Valentin’s uncle cuts into his veal and asks me something:
“Burgerschnitzelzeinwaffendoobleschnitt…Schaf?”
I lean across the table, nodding thoughtfully. “Schaf” is what I’ve got to go on. It sounds familiar. I fling open the door to my mind shed.
“SCHAF,” I shout into the dark interior, “SCHAF.”
Silence. The bleating of a sheep from behind a lawnmower. I drag it by the horns to the door and let it go. WRONG. We weren’t talking about sheep, were we? Perhaps we were…I rifle through shears, a seedling incubator, fertilizer, “SCHAF, SCHAF, SCHAF.”
Out pops a shepherd from under a floorboard. “Schäfer?” he suggests, pointing sheepishly to himself in the chest. I grab his withered arm and march him through the doorway. WRONG. I turn back as a ticket inspector claws her way out of a bag of compost like that scene from Lord of the Rings where the Uruk-hai claws its way out of the slime. (I don’t like ticket inspectors.)
“Schaffner,” she says, mid “choo choo” action. I grab her by the whistle and launch her through the glass window. She lands on the schäfer outside, who adjusts his tea towel headdress and blearily commends me on being “sehr schaffig.”
This is also not the word I am looking for. I lob a biscuit tin full of old seeds at him and feel a sense of achievement. Then suddenly – I did it. It was…achieved. “SCHAFFEN,” I exclaim – to achieve or complete! “SCHAFFEN, SCHAFFEN, SCHAFFEN.” This man was asking me whether I’d completed my dissertation, which, as it happens, has nothing whatsoever to do with sheep. I slam the door of the mind shed, bleating receding, as I race back to the conversation.
Valentin’s uncle has finished his sentence, and also his veal. I appear to have arrived with the second course. His aunt turns to me with an encouraging smile and asks another question: “Also, wie ist es mit…[lost in translation]? und ja natürlich, wenn du willst….[lost in translation]…. Fahrplan.”
Fahrplan? Fahrplan?
Fahrplan…
Fahr. Plan.
I pause, and with a sinking feeling, trudge back to the mind shed.