55 / 180
55
That was fine as long as they helped with the rent, which
was still fairly affordable. With me, my father, Fergus,
Irene, Max, the guest and the guest’s friend, there were
sometimes up to seven of us sitting in the kitchen for a late
Saturday breakfast, pooling whatever everyone had
brought, things like honey, fresh bread or stuffed grape
leaves from the market, so that all sorts of ill-matched,
sweet and savoury goodies were placed on the table. Each
of us had his or her own taste: a bit Bavarian with white
sausage and sweet mustard, a bit English with scrambled
eggs and bacon, a bit homey with someone’s mother’s jam,
a bit of solidarity with the supposedly multicultural society,
which was no more than a vague idea in the form of feta
cheese, Turkish bread, hummus and mozzarella and,
occasionally, some kind of exotic fruit that no one quite
knew how to peel. I remember well our richly endowed
kitchen table, cigarette butts pressed into empty eggshells,
the mixed smells of coffee and wheat beer, the array of
chipped mugs and always blunt knives that were pushed
out of reach whenever I made a grab at them. I remember
sitting on Paul’s lap as he fed me applesauce while Irene let
him have a puff of one of the cigarettes she rolled, which
she gently pushed between his lips. After a while, Paul
passed me on and so I did the rounds, sitting on warm laps
letting everyone play with me as if I were a doll: arms up
and down, feet up and down, I was tickled and sniffed, or
lifted into the air by Fergus, until they’d had enough of me
and got bored. Then they deposited me in the playpen,
which was either in Paul’s room or in the hallway. No