On Thin Ice

Lieke writes…

Threadbare, floral-patterned curtains, a view over a piece of waste ground, a narrow bed, an uncomfortable chair, a low-watt ceiling light that’s too dim for even the tiny room. There’s no coat hook on the door, nowhere to stow books or bags. On the windowsill is a dirty ash-tray, a painted side plate with a girl in a dirndl in front of a mountain lake and “Titisee, Switzerland” on it. A maid’s room, the woman said on the phone. I take it.
I share a kitchen and bathroom with four other parties in the other rooms, contract workers and technicians at Seepex or MC Construction Muller, nice people who don’t talk much and make no noise and leave the bathroom clean. In the mornings I hear the shower, the kettle in the small kitchen, the opening and shutting of doors. Someone whistles a tune. My own shift starts at noon. By the time I get up, all the others are gone, and the bathroom and toilet are clear. Only the steam in the air and the fogged mirror indicate that someone used them ahead of me. I open the little dormer window, and cold air flows in. It’s a cloudy day outside.
I bought myself a secondhand bicycle. When I’m not using it, I keep it in the corridor. The landlady moaned, but I discussed it with my fellow-tenants, and they’re not bothered. They’ve all got company cars anyway. They park outside the house at night, by day they’re on some development course or installing a new assembly line. Most of them only stay a week or two. I’ve lived here for all of two months.
I always do the first descent alone. Sometimes I close my eyes for a few moments, and I can almost imagine I’m in the mountains. It’s a bitingly cold morning, the lifts have only just started up, there’s hardly anyone yet using them. The sky is blue, but the sun hasn’t yet peeped out from behind the mountains. The snow creaks under my skis as I make my way from the ski lift to the top of the piste. I stand on the edge for a moment, till the sun crests the mountain. Everything is suddenly flooded with white. I set off, swooping down over the gentle, then steeper incline. The wind makes my eyes water, my face is burning in the cold. I force my eyes open and I go into a wide turn. I know the exact spot where I need to be to catch the gentle rise at the bottom of the slope. The lights go green. One minute’s descent, five on the travelator in that horrid tunnel. The ceiling has been punctured in lots of places by ski sticks, there is graffiti on the concrete cladded walls, posters for Veltin’s lager, it goes down easy. From the loud-speakers there’s oompah music and at regular intervals an announcement repeated in German, Dutch, and English. Do not sit on the moving carpet. They may have a chairlift in Neuss, but our slope is twice the length—in fact, it’s the longest in the world.
Up at the mouth of the tunnel, I see Carola waiting for me with my group, half a dozen fully accoutered Dutch people, none of whom have ever been on skis before. What’s the snow like, Carola asks me. Not great. The cooling unit failed a couple of days ago and it will take a little longer for the hall to reach its temperature of 25. Well, it’ll be okay, she says. Have fun. Break a leg.
I always imagined currywurst would be something else—a sausage that tasted of curry. Never fancied it. Then the first time I tried it, I really liked it, and since then I have one at least once a week. Admittedly, the menu is pretty limited here. There are dozens of kebab shops, a steakhouse, a few cafés, and that’s about the size of it. The Germans seem to eat more kebabs than the Turks do. I must have put on five or six pounds since I’ve been here, but I don’t care.
My Dutch group, four women and two men, all work for a vegetable wholesaler. They came on a minibus from Venlo, just an hour away. We are Limburgers, not Hollanders, says one of the men. Isn’t that a cheese? A stinky cheese, says one of the women, and laughs. I don’t know if they’ve been on the sauce already this morning, at any rate they all laugh boisterously and make stupid jokes and off-color remarks. Especially one of the women, called Lieke. I like Lieke. I forgot all the other names right away. I don’t know what she’s been told about ski instructors, but whatever it is, she takes my arm any chance she gets, grabs hold of me, lets me help her up when she falls, and then clutches me clumsily.
After a couple of hours on the nursery slope, the Dutch have had enough. Now they want to go get something to eat, after all it’s included in the price. As are drinks, including beer and wine. There is a separate canteen for the employees, but sometimes I go to the buffet with the visitors. It’s not really meant to happen, but it is tolerated, as a kind of customer service. The food there isn’t bad, currywurst, hamburgers, chicken tenders, fried potatoes, wok vegetables, French fries. You have to leave your rucksacks in the lockers, I say. Oh, why is that? Sometimes people turn up with Tupperware containers and fill them up with the food. Dutch people mostly, as I don’t say.
Lieke helps herself to rice and vegetables. She’s a vegetarian, she tells me, and suddenly she’s all serious and tells me about this documentary on raising pigs that she saw recently. Those poor beasts penned in tiny crates, without any daylight. I go ahead and have a currywurst anyway. Lieke is a team leader in sorting and packaging at Eurofresh, she has dozens of people under her. She’s a bit plump, maybe that’s what makes her look younger than she is. Forty, she says. The others laugh. What about you? Thirty-five. Fresh veg, says one of the women in Dutch, gives my arm a squeeze and bats her lashes at me.
The men drink beer, the women drink white wine spritzers. The conversation is in Dutch. By now, I’m able to follow it a bit, and can say a few words, slow, left, right, careful, well done. Goed gedaan! But they talk so fast, I can’t work out what they’re talking about. Lieke sits opposite me, and sometimes I catch her looking at me, but when I look at her, she looks away and jumps into the conversation, says something or other. What’s white and puts you off your food? she asks in an accented, guttural German. An avalanche. Everyone laughs. Suddenly they’re all speaking German, pretty fluently and well. They ask me questions. Where do I come from? How did I get stuck here? A Swiss ski instructor in the Ruhrgebiet? Was this a punishment transfer? I have answers prepared that are not wrong, but are not the whole truth either. Women are supposed to find ski instructors irresistible, says Lieke, out of the blue. Speak for yourself, says one of the men, and the others all laugh. Who wants another beer? Don’t have too many, I say, after lunch we’re going to do the whole run, and it’s steep at the bottom.
Now they’re talking Dutch again, I think the subject is tattoos; at any rate one of the men shows us his upper arm with a tattoo of an anchor and a compass rose intricately entwined. The anchor stands for dependability, for assurance, I read that somewhere. And the compass rose? For departure? Other men may be the seven seas, but you, you’re the harbor . . .
I get out my cigarettes and stand up. Lieke says she’ll join me.
When the weather gets warm at the beginning of June, I start to get up earlier. My room faces southeast and quickly heats up. Now, I sometimes run into the contract workers when they eat their breakfast in the little kitchen. A couple of days ago, two left us, and we have two new ones I haven’t met. They are carpenters and their job is the outfitting of the café in the new Edeka mart in the station, which I’ve experienced firsthand. They head off to work while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil.
There are letters for me on the kitchen table, one from my lawyer, the other from my sister. After the police questioning, I just left. Just get away, as far away as possible. That’s how I came to wash up here.
My sister writes at length about the family, what the children are doing, the little one is due to start infant school in fall, my goddaughter is starting year two. You won’t forget her birthday, will you? It wouldn’t be the first time. She writes that they’re going to the Dolomites for their summer break. For herself, she would rather be somewhere by the sea, but Iso, her husband, is an Alpine guide and a ski instructor in the winter, and for him it always has to be mountains. Then she gets to writing about me. It’s the same story in every one of her letters, it could have happened to anyone, the woman was just as much to blame as I was, she had behaved foolishly. No one was blaming me, she had spoken to various people about it. Iso let me know I was welcome back at the school in the winter. I put the letter back in its envelope without getting to the end of it. The lawyer’s one can wait.
I take my coffee back to my room. I drink it and fool around online, look at a couple of news sites and YouTube videos of the Falquet brothers. I met them once at a sponsors’ event, nice guys who do their job and talk less crap than most in that line. They film themselves racing down steep slopes, flying over rocks, doing the wildest and most dangerous stunts, only the music gets on my wick. I love the sound snow makes, the absolute stillness when you stand there and nothing moves. It makes me hold my breath to listen to that no-sound. One descent through a snowy forest in Japan, a slalom in amongst small densely planted trees, powdery snow, sometimes the whiteness is all you see. I get on my bike and go to the public baths. There’s no one at the entrance desk, which saves me three euros. The place is almost deserted, only here and there dotted about the grass mothers with their young children, fat tanned men in Speedos sprawled on deckchairs. In the big pool two young women are teaching their kids how to swim. Tummies up! Kick your feet! I feel sorry for the kids, I don’t know why. I’ve had groups of kids in the indoor slope, I felt sorry for them as well. Basically, I feel sorry for all children. When I said that once to my former girlfriend, she said you just feel sorry for yourself.
I sit at the poolside, dangling my feet in the water. The light wind in the sycamores, the dark gurgling of the water in the overflow. The sun comes and goes with the clouds. Summer is everywhere but.
I swim a few lengths, first counting, then forgetting to. On the grass next to the pool is the skeleton of a high-board, there must have been a diving pool here once. I lie down in the grass and close my eyes. Far off, children are yelling and the mothers are still giving their instructions. Tummies up! Kick your feet! I picture myself climbing up to the board. After a while the lifeguard notices me, he blows his shrill whistle and waves his arms, but I keep going up and up, to the top level, where there’s no more board, just rusty iron struts. I balance on them, holding on to the handrails. Now I’m standing right at the end, looking down on the mothers, the fat men, the children, none of whom have noticed me, and are just doing their laps, and the lifeguard who has stopped waving his arms, and is just looking up in my direction. I let go of the rail and spread my arms. I fly. On my way to the ski slope, I get the text message signal from my phone. I read it while waiting for the lights to change. Lieke wrote, It’s just another manic Monday (Woah, woah)! I put my phone away, and push off. Moments later, I get another one. I read that one after I’ve changed. I wish it was Sunday (Woah, woah)! I should never have given her my number.