'Maybe I should retrain as a ....."
This unique novella, set in East Berlin's Marzahn, gets me thinking (again.)
I always, always think about getting a ‘real’ job. In health care, usually. Despite the fact that I’m not very good with blood or wounds or mess. If I could find a job that involved lovingly applying Bandaids to small surface wounds and administering Nurofen squirts while half asleep I’d be fine, but obviously the coal face of actual healthcare is a bit more involved than that.
Often when procrastinating I will research a particular job in healthcare and look into training and plan out my new career and maybe make a phone call or send away for some information. And then I lose interest and go back to writing. What I do is work with words, I remind myself. I’ve always done that, I always will do that (I hope) and my modest task in life is to give people with their actual, real jobs something decent to read after a long day. Until my next wobble.
So I was very drawn to Marzahn, Mon Amor, which is about a writer in midlife going through a rough professional patch, who becomes a chiropodist. The novella opens with a description of her brief training in Charlottenburg and the people she trains with:
“None of us had taken a direct path, all of us were on the rebound from somewhere, stranded or bogged down. We knew what failure felt like. We had arrived humble, modest and subdued, ready to forget our previous lives, erase our accomplishments and start again with clean slates. We had reached a low point, at people’s feet, and even there we were failing.”
Following this is a series of vignettes about her clients and what she learns from and about them in the East Berlin suburb of Marzahn, a district of Plattenbau (concrete panel) apartment housing that you won’t find in any tourist guide.
“You’re at an age when your child’s youth take you back to your own, but your partner’s illness has turned you from lover into carer. Surfacing in the middle of the big lake and swimming on, there’s plenty you can see, plenty you are familiar with and even more you can imagine. You’re at an age when, if you’re at the start of an adventure, thoughts of how it will end are already creeping in on the quiet. My middle years, working as a chiropodist in Marzahn, will have been good years.”
Her clients, who she ‘sends up into the air’ on their mechanical thrones, are all East Berliners. There’s the ex-Stasi officer, the two friends who look after each other’s dachshunds during their back-to-back appointments, the man who is brought in by his social workers, the lovely gentleman who is gradually losing his memory and may not find his way back again. It’s a story about ageing, and how we are cared for by others, or not, all told through these portaits of mostly elderly people that would otherwise go unrecorded. I can see a little of Kathe Kollwitz in her work, another Berlin artist who drew patients in the waiting room of her husband’s surgery in Prenzlauerberg.
It’s also a book about work, which I love. From the greeting to the foot bath to the massage and payment and farewells, the storytelling has a lovely momentum and rhythm. Like hairdressers, this work is about touch and affection and social contact for the lonely. She unwraps their chocolates, strokes their cheek, sees a glimpse of their younger selves in their stories and demeanour.
“I take her left foot and steadily stroke from the base joints of her toes along her instep towards her ankle joints. Everything feels so delicate, so easily broken. I draw on what I’ve learned over many massages: contact over a wide surface area gives more pleasure than a targeted touch. One hand must alway remain on the foot to avoid the sensation of abandonment. A moderate tempo shows I’m not in a hurry.”
Marzahn, Mon Amour was published in Germany and then translated by Jo Heinrich and published by Peirene Press, a small publisher in Bath that translates novellas and offers an annual subscription.
It’s an inspiring book about the writing life, too. Based on Katja Oskamp’s own career change, it shows how you can get a bit bruised by the industry, pick yourself up, go out and live life regardless, then write something absolutely brilliant and win the Dublin Literary Prize and 100,000 euros, Danke very much.
It’s a solid argument for doing things other than writing for a sense of achievement, whatever that may be. The book is undeniably – to me, anyway – better and richer for the author having lived through what she is writing about.
As she said to the Irish Times upon winning the award, “If you are in front of your screen all day long you don’t know in the evening what actually made you tired, what you achieved or did not achieve. In chiropody I know every evening what I have done. I know I had 13 or 16 pairs of feet, everybody was happy, everybody was satisfied, everybody left in a better mood than they entered the room, and this is something very satisfying.”
I just love that, as a writer and as a reader.
Author and teacher Natalie Goldberg once said that a writer can abandon writing but it never abandons you, and this book is solid proof of that theory. Oskamp still works as a chiropodist, but has scaled back her hours due to the success of her book, and now has fans and readers making appointments with her (Maybe this is how Marzahn will get on the tourist map? Maybe this is my next career?)
I’m Zoe Deleuil. I'm a freelance writer, author and copywriter. My psychological suspense novel, The Night Village, about a new mother and her unsettling house guest, is out now (and if you look closely at the cover you might recognise the building.)
Absolutely love the sound of this.
This book sounds great - I'm going to look it up, thx! I very much agree that other work (especially physical work) really helps it, both as a relief from writing's ambiguous nothing-till-its-somethingness, and as fuel to feed ideas.