For one of my next pieces, I’d like to try writing in English. Well, I haven’t written stories in English for a very long time. But reading helps. More than anything. My role model is Lauren Groff and her literary, poetic, yet energetic writing style. Of course, living here in Vienna, realistically, I’ll never get there. 🙂 But it feels good to have role models anyway.
In the meantime, as an experiment, I’d like to publish a translation of my text “Familienfahrt” today—which I’d rather call “The Car Ride” . Turn on the music to enjoy it fully.
The children wave and smile at the people in the neighboring cars. We are not the kind of parents who comment on it. We are not the kind who want to encourage it or even forbid it. It is up to the children how they choose to entertain themselves during the long drive. We are not like our own parents, under whose roof there were endless rules to obey, and even when we obeyed them, now and then we still earned a slap or were made to apologize for something we had never understood in the first place.
My Uncle Tschockerl had gone bald before thirty—and unlike my parents, he was never offended, it seemed. He winked at my brother and me, slipped folded banknotes into our jacket pockets when no one was looking, and offered us cigarettes and schnapps the moment we turned fourteen. These days our children do not even greet Uncle Tschockerl. One of their decisions.
Last year’s drive was different. We were stuck at the border for what seemed like an eternity, with whining children in the back seat. Suddenly a young man climbed out of the Audi ahead of us, smiling. He handed my husband and me an energy drink each. We had not touched an energy drink in years—not since before the children were born.
Once, we drank them every weekend, two or three at least, always mixed with vodka—probably the unhealthiest combination imaginable. These days, I don’t sleep if I have coffee after three in the afternoon.
But that day in the car, we both drank it. We turned on the music from our old life. By the second song the children had stopped protesting and were shyly trying to sing along.
Because we are your friends …1
That day, we remembered the summers in Greece. Our island. The nights danced clean through till dawn, the blistering afternoons on the beach with our friends. ‘Mr. Brightside’ had been our song. Even I, who was never especially uninhibited, would take off my top in the club and twirl it above my head, while my husband, who was still proud of his bare chest at the time, did the same. We screamed the lyrics together:
Jealousy
Turning saints into the sea
Swimming through sick lullabies
Choking on your alibis
But it’s just the price I pay
Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
‘Cause I’m Mr. Brightside 2
That day in the car, the children stared at us wide-eyed. Their expressions drifted somewhere between admiration and embarrassment. We rolled down the windows on both sides, something we usually never do. The draft might make the children sick. That day, we opened them wide, drank from our environmentally disgraceful cans, imagined the vodka inside, and sang loudly and badly along to Mr. Brightside.
That day, behind our red sunglasses, we caught each other’s eyes in the rearview mirror and felt ourselves in love again. The intoxication of it. The lightness. The pleasure of fighting. The wild sex, the jealousy, the cheap philosophical revelations that had occupied us for entire drunken nights beside the little whitewashed stone wall on our island. All the reasons we had once become a loving couple. All the reasons that, after years of strange youth and confusion and mercurial moods, we had suddenly become happy. That day in the car, all of it came rushing back at once.
This year everything is as it always is. The children wave at strangers and my husband smiles at his glowing white screen. I am hot, and I do not want to be driving this car.
This will be our last trip together. Our last family trip. If I am brave enough, that is.
Perhaps my husband senses it. Although he stopped asking years ago, he has always had that delicate instinct for my feelings and has sometimes known me better than I know myself.
The children suspect nothing. They have never known it any other way. They are accustomed to receiving whatever love remains in us after a day that has wrung us dry. They are accustomed to our Friday-night arguments and to the way, by Sunday, we try to build an idyll again, like a damp, collapsing sandcastle. Only last year, on that day in the car, they saw us as we truly were: we as WE.
Ever since that day in the car, I have wanted back my tiny puzzle piece—one piece from those bright children’s puzzles with far too many pieces—my sliver of freedom, that overwhelming sensation of being fiercely alive. For an entire year I have thought of almost nothing else. But my husband erased the day again—with the eraser cap from my little daughter’s pencil.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, still during those same holidays.
I should never have looked into the rearview mirror.
[1] Justice: We Are Your Friends
[2] The Killers: Mr. Brightside
Running Words 