It was 5h45 pm sharp. I’d better get ready.
I could hear Orga fumbling in the kitchen probably preparing cups for the usual chai tea ceremony bullshit, if you’ll excuse my French.
She had brought back this weird powder from her last trip to India, which she mixed with a strange organic soy milk that she bought at a Bio Laden nearby, and the result was an overly sweet, nauseating beverage that produced a grey foam whose sickening taste lingered on the tongue the entire day.
I prepared myself to claim I had just found out that I was lactose intolerant, but then thought she would immediately throw away all the Roquefort I had carefully stuck in a corner of our common fridge, like she had done with Torsten’s Danish bread the other day when she had baked atrocious cinnamon cookies and he’d told her he couldn’t eat gluten.
Orga was short for Origami. Her parents had been a pure breed of hippies and since their death three years ago she had spent half her time wandering about in India, and the other half teaching yoga in a fancy studio in Mitte.
I added yet another touch of my “New York Red” lipstick, which two swanky friends of mine had offered me for my 25th birthday, and got out of my bedroom.
Orga who was bringing the tea tray to the living room rewarded me with a very broad, grateful smile, and I smiled back, hypocrite and uncomfortable.
She just constantly acted too nice, spoke in too high-pitched a voice, wore too colourful clothes, and always had the most annoying “brilliant ideas”.
“You know we don’t really have a feeling of community, here. A feeling of truly living together, you know what I mean? We should just all sit down with one another, now that you’ve arrived and are part of us, and all speak our minds to share our vision and work on it together. You know? Like a family.”
Smile.
Purple rose in her hair.
Big blue eyes and soft spoken words.
The girl just gave me the creeps.
I looked at the time on the Ganesh-shaped mobile that was lying on the table: 5h55. Soon the others would join. Hopefully.
I sat down, and she offered me a cup of tea.
– So how are you Sandra, how are you feeling, after your first week here?
– Oh, great, yeah.
I hadn’t been living in Berlin for one week. I had been living in Berlin for one year, but nobody knew. I had said that I was coming straight from Paris and that I was desperate to move in with the right people as soon as possible.
The truth was, I had spent my last year bed hopping around Berlin from lover to lover, using their apartments to the very last corner, till I had read every book, played every game, eaten every dish in their fridge.
The first days’ excitement had left room to a solid, consistent boredom.
It was time for a change.
– Do you know where the others are?
– Heu, no…
I quite enjoyed answering her in monosyllables. I could see how it confused her and made her feel nervous.
She started talking out loud, giving various reasons why the others might be late.
But then a noise was heard in the doorway and the two others, like mechanical, well-oiled and disciplined robots, appeared.
Immediately, my heart started to beat stronger and I fought hard not to let the flow of blood come rushing to my cheeks.
I could feel a delicious tension in my body and had to give my best to stay focused, and do what one does in Berlin when meeting with their roommates: get up and give them a big hug, an asexual-teddy-bear-like-greeting.
– Okay, now that we’re all here, let’s just sit down. Louise, you can sit here next to Torsten, and I’ll sit here next to Sandra, ok?
Torsten sat down with a happy sigh and put down a large beer bottle on the table: “Aaaaah!”
Orga looked at him reproachfully: “Torchti, we said we would all drink the same thing. I mean it’s not cool if you come here with your own beer and we’re all drinking tea: it’s already a misbalance.”
– Yeah it’s true, nan? That’s so typical German, in a way. In France we always bring everything for everybody. Nan? Like a bottle of wine for the whole group, or a pack of beer but never this individual thing, I still can’t get used to it!
Louise was speaking in a very friendly voice, as always. She was a pretty girl, with intelligent, witty green eyes. The fact that we were both French had not made it easier at first: even though she was still spending her life comparing Germany to France and criticising what she didn’t like of her new adoptive country, she also hated to realize she was not alone in Germany, and that some of her compatriots had actually made the same choice as her. She avoided Frenchmen like the plague. And so did I, actually.
After the first “Fuck, she’s French” moment, we realized that we both belonged to the category of Parisians that we actually liked, and acknowledged each other as one of our own.
Nevertheless, I was growing embarrassed by her comments on Germany. She had been living in Berlin for the past four years, but was still holding on to the image she bear of Paris and of Parisian manners, and had taken my arrival in the WG as an excuse to express an impressive amount of clichés about the two countries.
– It’s fine, if Torsten wants to drink a beer. I don’t feel like drinking anyway right now, I said.
Torsten looked at me with a conniving gaze, and opened the bottle with his ligther.
The little “Ploc” made me realize I would actually really enjoy drinking a beer rather than this filled-with-organic-Bhutanese-honey-tea I was discreetly spitting back into my cup with every gulp.
– Okay guys. So now that we’re altogether, we can officially start this “WG Gespräch”, as we say in Germany. By the way, how do you say in French?
– We don’t have this in French, cause we’re more spontaneous, you know. When we need to say something, we just say it. That’s why I didn’t understand when you told me the other day that you wanted to meet today. I mean, I don’t mind, and it’s actually nice to get together, and you made tea and everything, but it’s just funny that you didn’t actually want to talk about our problems the other day since we were already together, and that we had to make a special meeting, you know.
This girl had a way of speaking everything she had on her mind all the time. As if she didn’t know either irony, or second degree, or lies, or any way to smooth the path out.
– But well, what I’m saying now is not so important, I just wanted to say that: yeah, we don’t have a word for it, cause we just do it, you know.
Torsten’s mobile vibrated on the table. He checked it quickly, and joyfully said:
– Ok girls, let’s get on to it, shall we?
Orga thanked him with her eyes:
– Yes okay. So! This WG Gespräch today is first of all to welcome Sandra, our new Mitbewohnerin: Welcome Sandra. Biennevénoue.
– Merci.
– I hope you’ll really feel at home here. Hey, and you already can feel at home cause Louise is French! (Big smile. Pink flower still in the hair). But apart from expressing to Sandra how happy we are to have her with us now, there’s a second thing I think we should mention today. We all live here together, and that’s why we need to once in a while come back to certain statements that have been made, so as to clarify some of the common agreements we have about sharing our house and life with one another.
We all remained silent. Waiting for the gibberish to make sense.
– Lately there have been some disturbances that we would need to speak about and sort out…. And since we all live here and understand what sharing a home means, I think it is important to be very honest and very direct, so that there are no other turbulences, and that we all feel on the same page. So. The turbulences… are coming from you, Torsten. And I’m gonna tell you, directly and honestly, what they are.
You’re the only man in the WG as you know, and sometimes, when you bring girls in at night, it would be super nice if you could just be a little bit more respectful of the other girls’s –which means us – sleep.
Long, steady gaze with slow moving of the pink flower in the hair so as to help her words penetrate Torsten’s brains.
– You know that it’s puja week this week, which means I have to get up three times a night to meditate, and that Louise has to leave the house every day at 6h30 am even though she’s got to write her PHD in the evening, so she just doesn’t get that much sleep, and Sandra… well Sandra hasn’t said anything yet, but I’m sure she’s not enjoying it more than we do…
My ears were burning but I knew my face was still calm.
Without glancing at Torsten, I looked directly into Orga’s washed-out blue eyes, and answered:
– Well, so far I haven’t had anything to complain about.
– Really? asked Louise. Well you must have a heavy sleep!
I dared to have a glimpse at Torsten, who appeared to be rather enjoying the whole scene.
– Why darling, what do you hear at night?
– Well everything, answered Orga with a sudden outburst of rage. Absolutely everything!
– Like what?
– You want me to do you the sound and light show? Come on! You know what I hear!
– No, I don’t.
– I hear the bed squeaking, I hear it stomping against the wall, I hear the girls moaning, I—
– The girls? Which girls?
– I don’t know which girls, they don’t come to me for a previous Anmeldung, you know!
– Well, the other day there was a Frenchgirl, said Louise.
– Wow! You and France, huh? Even in your sexual fantasies! said Torsten provocatively, loving the game.
– What do you mean my sexual fantasies?
It was the first time that I saw Louise slowly loose her temper.
– I clearly heard several, repeated “Oui”! “OUI”! OK!? Alors?
– She could’ve been Belgian! Or from Quebec! What do you know if she was French or not? You’re making an intellectual shortcut, honey.
– Whatever! Either French or from fucking Guyana we could hear her fucking scream, so next time, I don’t know, go Fifity Shades of Fucking gag on her, but no need to share everything with us, thank you.
– Exactly! And this very valid point brings us to the third, and most important point of today’s discussion: How do we want to share?
Orga had made a step forward.
She inhaled once, deeply, and started:
– I had a lot of real interesting talks with Dutch guys while I was in India, and I stumbled upon this article the other day and this is the actual reason why I wanted us to meet today. I’d like to talk to you all about it. It’s a new concept of communal living, a way of redesigning space and creating new links, of living new experiences, in harmony, by sharing, to give a real true meaning to this whole idea of living together.
Torsten listened with his beer in his hand and an ironical grin on his lips. Louise nibbled on a “Petit Beurre” biscuit and stared at Orga with an interrogative look.
– So yeah, it’s called CTTL, for “Coming Together & Truly Living” and the concept is that instead of sharing only the living room and dividing the remaining space in an individual way like we do now, we would get to really share, but like really share, the entire space, as well as our habits. So in fact it would mean that we’d take the brightest room and we’ll turn it into our Arbeitszimmer, you know, something like a mini-coworking space but zu Hause, you know. Like a richtige Arbeitsplatz, something where we’d get to experience true emulation, where we could share and come talk to one another to solve the problems we would encounter and solve them like a real cohesive team, like… like COLLEAGUES!!
Orga was getting excited. Her breath was short, her cheeks were blushing, she had risen from the sofa and was walking up and down what was still the living room, and we could see that she really saw this Arbeitszimmer, that she had it in front of her eyes and that she was absolutely loving it, loving its star-shape-desks-constellation, each of them pointing to another cardinal point.
– And then we would choose the quieter room and make it our bedroom for all. It would be THE bedroom. We would put our four beds in it and define it like the ULTIMATE Schlafzimmer, you know, “The Room Where You Sleep”. But like all of us! Where we all sleep together.
Orga was screaming now, with her high-pitched voice, and a blue vein had appeared on her forehead: she looked like a hectic Breton or a Peruvian farmer on acid, a short-circuited Duracell rabbit.
– This way we wouldn’t just be MITBEWOHNER, but we’d be EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING AT THE SAME TIME! WE’D BE FRIENDS, WE’D BE FAMILY, COUNSELORS, COLLEAGUES—
– LOVERS? And all fuck one another? You want us to—to what? To MERGE? C’est ça? L’éveil par les trois trous?
Boy, had I been mistaking about who Louise truly was. I would never have thought that she could be capable of such fierceness. I suddenly saw her as the Parisian she must have been back then – and it was my turn now to see life through clichés – walking the Seine bank with her elegant, determined, feline step, making men vanish from her resolute pathway with the tip of a finger, the tartness of a word.
– It’s ok to drink your yogi shit, to pretend we’re not gonna puke it later on, and make believe we’re all just a big family, but there’s a limit to everything, ok? All your little rules and regulations just start to break my balls! You also want us to wipe each other’s ass in ZE bathroom? What the fuck? If you’re so desperate for human touch then go back to India and ride around in a bus, you’ll have your share of bums and boobs and armpits and sweaty flesh in your face! But don’t make us the guinea pigs of your lonely life. C’est clair?
Louise had gotten up. I couldn’t help but notice her natural grace, the nervousness of her frail body. She had the elegance of a great lady, and the irritability of a movie star.
– I got other shit to do than to listen to this post-hippiesque delirium.
Orga looked deeply shocked. When she opened her mouth, her voice was shaking with anger.
– Stop right there. You don’t leave before we all have said our word.
– You don’t have a right to give me orders, Orga. I pay my rent like everybody in this room, and I got my name on the Mietvertrag. So that’s that. It’s not because you’ve declared yourself a WG Guru that I got to listen to you. When you’re away six months a year trying to find who the fuck you’ve become you’re not the one repairing the sink, ok? So camembert now, shanti shanti!
She vanished, leaving behind her a substantial parfum de scandale.
Orga, stunned, turned to Torsten and spoke to him in German.
My peregrinations from the previous year hadn’t allowed me to master this language as fully as I would’ve liked to: I could now talk enough of Turkish, Farsi, and Venezualian Spanish to get everything I needed from a man, but when it came to German I still couldn’t figure where to put the verb after the weil, so I kept quiet and let them talk.
Torsten answered in a very calm way, one unique little sentence made of five words, which apparently hit the right spot cause Orga left the room very quickly and we heard her lock herself up in her bedroom.
– So it’s not so bad after all to have one’s own space, hm? Torsten said, and he came closer to me.
His warmth against my thigh. The beauty of his mocking smile.
I fell back in his arms and we continued where we had had to stop in the early morning, when the cuckoo’s alarm clock had started singing “Om mani padme hum” and when the Galerie Lafayette frozen baguette’s scent had began penetrating the room.
– Ze WG life, ladies and gentlemen, smiled Torsten, while starting to sensually bite the sensitive part of my neck. Orga’s right, though, ZE WG-Love trouli iz ze ültimate cing.
