‘Where are you from?’ he asks in German.
‘Sweden,’ I say in English. To be honest, I can speak German, albeit with my own interpretation of the grammar, but I decide to speak English to give me the advantage.
His eyes widen and he smiles at me.
‘Have you been to Sweden?’ I ask.
‘Nah,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘But after reading so many Swedish crime novels it almost feels like it. Sweden is Wallanderland.’
‘Wallanderland sounds like a theme park,’ I say. ‘One where everyone dies.’
I see Leonore trying to make eye contact with me. Probably because the guy she’s talking to is a head shorter than her and is wearing a necklace with a Mercedes symbol on it. Going to a nightclub in Austria often feels like being thrown back to a time when eighties jewellery wasn’t worn ironically and Ace of Base still ruled. I ignore Leonore and turn back to my guy.
‘A Swedish told me there’s not actually any crime in Ystad,’ he says.
‘That’s because Kurt Wallander’s solved all the crimes,’ I reply.
The guy laughs and suddenly I hope something will happen between us.
‘Where are you from?’ I ask.
‘Munich,’ he replies. I tick box one.
‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ I ask.
The guy looks surprised at first, then smiles boyishly.
‘Yeah,’ he says. After a few seconds he adds: ‘Sorry.’
I tick box two. In spite of this, I give him my phone number when he asks for it.
When I get home I watch eighties porn on RedTube and give myself an orgasm to help me sleep. But it doesn’t work. I lie on my side and stare at the dark wall. I decide that next weekend I will arrange my books in colour order.
My first group the next day is an AMS group. When I come into the room they’re already sitting there like three wax dolls. There’s a woman with a double chin and gold rings that cut into her fingers. A young girl with white-blonde hair and dark roots is sitting tearing her cuticles with her teeth. The guy with a moustache and a checked shirt has a spookily absent gaze, but at least he’s ready, pen in hand.
‘Hi!’ I say. ‘My name is Julia and I will be teaching you today.’
None of them responds.
Once I actually had a job I loved. Just after Matthias and I moved to Vienna I got a position as a journalist. The paper was called VIenna frOnT – the capitals were meant to show the paper’s disregard for norms and traditions. We had a tiny office in the fifteenth district and we were fuelled by Almdudler, Leberkäse sandwiches and irony. Aside from covering the domestic news, I also got to write columns about right-wing politicians’ fondness for tying jumpers round their shoulders, and analyses of the German-speaking world’s relationship to yoghurt drinks. VIenna frOnT was supposed to hold a mirror to the world and make it draw breath. We lasted five months before the paper went bust.
‘Hello, what is your name?’ I say to the woman with the sausage fingers.
‘Bettina,’ she replies.
‘My name is …’ I correct her gently.
‘My name is Bettina,’ she says.
Bettina’s cheap, pink, butterfly-print viscose top strains over the bulges of her belly and her eyes have that desperate look that says ‘don’t hate me’. Because this group is Level Two, getting any information out of them is painfully slow. Once, an AMS student started crying when I asked what her last job was, so since then I’ve stopped asking what AMS students used to do for work, which has unfortunately halved the number of subjects we can talk about. But after three long classes I know that Bettina gets out of bed at 4 a.m. so she can have some time to herself before her kids wake up; Steffi has a bichon frise called Toto (after the band, not The Wizard of Oz) and Hans likes gardening. We’ve also practised common questions and greetings. All the way through I’ve tried to smile and be enthusiastic (‘Learning a new language = NEW OPPORTUNITIES!’) to avoid dashing any hope that these lessons will actually have an impact on their job hunt.
During the break, I light up when I see Rebecca in the staffroom. She walks up to me with wide eyes.
‘I think one of my AMS students is drunk,’ she whispers and takes my arm.
‘I have an AMS student who gets up at four every morning just to get some peace,’ I whisper back. ‘Why not just stay asleep and be undisturbed that way?’
‘Four?!’ mouths Rebecca.
I nod.
‘But what can you even do at four in the morning?’ Rebecca says at normal volume.
‘Says she reads magazines and does sudoku,’ I reply, also at normal volume. Being with Rebecca always makes me happy. She’s my Good Witch of the North – in contrast to Leonore who would have got the part of the Wicked Witch of the West if I’d been Dorothy. Rebecca and I met during the Berlitz training course, and I decided she was going to be my friend as soon as I heard she was a violin maker. Someone who makes violins can only be a good, sensible person, like people who help lepers. Sadly, building violins hardly pays at all, which is why Rebecca also became an English teacher. But just think – I know someone who’s a violin maker! One day I also hope to have the following friends: a lesbian, a computer geek and someone from Brooklyn. And Elfriede, of course.
‘How many lessons do you have today?’ I ask.
‘Just three,’ she replies. ‘With the same group. And you?’
‘Ten.’
Rebecca’s eyes immediately narrow.
‘Stop taking on so many lessons!’ she says. ‘You should be spending your time writing books or freelance articles and interviewing people and going undercover and so on.’
‘But I’m undercover here,’ I say defensively. ‘I’m pretending to be an English teacher.’
And with that the bell rings and I have to return for another lesson with Bettina, Steffi and Hans.
With two bags of groceries in my hands I walk slowly up the stairs of the art nouveau-style building in the seventh district where I live. On the second floor I stop and look, as I always do, at the door that leads to the flat on the left. The one that faces onto the street, rather than the back yard like my fourth-floor flat. It normally smells faintly of smoke and coffee outside the door, and a few times I’ve glimpsed a shadow moving behind the frosted-glass windows. By the doorbell there’s a little plaque that says ‘E. Jelinek’ in ornate lettering. It took a couple of months before I realised who it could be. Then I asked the Serbian caretaker if it belonged to the celebrated novelist Elfriede Jelinek.
‘Yes, yes,’ he nodded eagerly. ‘A great lady. But very shy. Doesn’t go out much. Very particular.’
Ever since, I’ve been desperately trying to bump into my famous neighbour, without success. From the street I can see that her windows are dirty even though there are some gaudy plants there. For some reason I just can’t picture Elfriede Jelinek carefully tending her azaleas, however much I try. It’s like my subconscious only wants to see her over-watering cactuses and feeding flies to carnivorous plants.
Sometimes I blame my neighbour for the fact I’ve not yet become an author. It’s Elfriede’s fault (in my rage I always address her by her first name). The house’s literature quota has been used up by her, leaving