TE23 Double Feature

Marzahn, Mon Amour

Katja Oskamp

my file, rubbed cream into his feet, brought the chiropody chair back down to earth and pushed in the leg rests. Herr Hübner slipped on his filthy Crocs and shuffled after me to the till, where I asked him for twenty-two euros. ‘That’s a bit steep!’ he said, and winked at me. ‘Ah well, it’s no big deal. The state pays for it all, doesn’t it?’ I felt courageous enough to ask Herr Hübner why one of his social workers couldn’t cut his toenails. Or he could even do it himself. ‘It’s not in their contract. I can’t expect my girlfriend to do it and I’m depressed,’ he said, and he left the salon without rushing, without a thank you and without a goodbye.

Are they over, those fuzzy years? Those years when you were thrashing about in the middle of a big lake, turning around at a loss, flagging from the tedium of swimming? When fear set in, of sinking halfway, without a sound, without a cause? Is your bleak midlife crisis over?

I think so.

You’re almost fifty and you’ve realized that the time for you to do the things you want to do is now, not later. It might be an old self-help-book platitude, but it’s true all the same. You’re almost fifty and you’re even more invisible than you were: ideal conditions for doing those things, be they terrible, wonderful or peculiar. Against the chiropody room’s white walls, you’re so invisible in your white clothes that you can mirror your colourful clients, unnoticed, as they’re sitting on the pink throne. You spend all your time laughing with them, all your time thinking about them and sometimes you look 275

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