One month before my departure for Würzburg I had managed to locate a room at the service of an online real estate agency. I had spent groggy mornings reading room descriptions and browsing the occasional picture in my mailbox over breakfast. It would usually be a breakfast after some exercise in my room executed as early as five-thirty. I had worked as a purchaser for arriving vessels. I would start at eight-thirty in the morning and not leave before ten at night. The company was generous enough to pay for the cab which another temporary staff and I would take together, ending at Yishun. I would jog in the late night or do push-ups in my room if I returned earlier. Whether I exercised at night or not, it usually meant that I went to bed at around eleven-thirty and had to be up by six. I had had to exercise in the morning often but that had meant straining my sleepy tendons and muscles. I would eat two hard boiled eggs dipped into soba soya sauce on exercise mornings, sometimes without yolks. It was a unique memory: the refreshing taste of Japanese soba sauce washed down with strong coffee; butter and jam and chewy, protein-laden bread; and a fruit to round off the meal as I viewed the rooms on my HP laptop. I had finally decided on a room that was forty square metres for three hundred and twenty Deutschemark per month. It was an attic room with its own toilet and cooking facility - the latter described remotely as 'Kochmöglichkeit' -'cooking possibility'. I was to live with my hosts in a house along Hans-Löffler-Straße in a part of the city called 'Frauenland' - literally 'women's land' - which was a short walking distance to the University of Würzburg. For such a big room at that price, I hesitated little before agreeing. I realised that an average student's room was no more than twenty square metres. Sometimes, that contained a bathroom and a kitchenette - barely enough space for decent cooking and certainly infusing the room with last night's dinner. In some cases, it was a ridiculous 12 square metres.
I swelled with achievement after receiving an email from the agency that confirmed that the room had been reserved for me on the day I would arrive. I could not picture arriving from Frankfurt crippled with luggage and putting up at a hotel before embarking on a search for a host, a new home. It would have been a depressing exercise in a strange city faraway from home: foreign-sounding streets and alleys, scrutinising eyes before shutting doors, cobblestone roads no longer of an alluring distant culture but wearying newly arrived feet - a celebrated overseas expedition turned awry.
My landlord was a blond housewife who performed the modern, middle-class German curtsy of a stiff smile complete with coiffed early-90s puffy hair, a white long-sleeved shirt regularly striped with blue and khaki-brown leggings. As she led me up the stairs that spiralled to the third floor I struggled with my enormous luggage that was twenty-six kilograms. I cursed silently at the narrowness of the staircase that made my luggage knock a few corners and almost topple a vase. My luggage had caused me three hundred dollars at Changi airport because it was six kilograms overweight.
Beyond the first door which marked the precincts of my room was a three-metre long corridor to a second door - the inner-gate to the chamber, an attic room with slanting ceilings at both ends of the room. The two slanting ceiling blocks at each end framed a window with its dual-directional glass door - twist the handle one way and the glass would fall towards me with the base now acting as a pivot only to be halted by a locking mechanism which I could not manage to figure out; twist the handle in another way and the glass would open like a door. However, the windows were so deep inside the house that natural light was weak in the room and I subsequently often had to turn on the electrical lights. During mid-winter, I would open the window to be generously dazzled by the intense, glaring white of the rich but quiet terrain of snow outside as my room was gloomy and stuffy.
A door along the corridor led to the toilet, replete not only with sink, mirror, toilet bowl but also a oven-cum-stove and a small fridge. The toilet was also the said kitchenette. I had known that fact but had only chosen to overlook it while booking the room online in Singapore. However, there was a surreal unpleasantness in realising that I would be cooking in my toilet for the next few months. Yet, very soon, I was happily cooking everyday in my kitchenette-cum-toilet, sometimes for all three meals a day. The fridge top functioned as kitchen table. The oven-stove - two electric cooking panels atop an oven - worked exceedingly well. I would even boil pork soup with mushrooms and soy beans for hours and would have meat that slid off its bones for dinner. The stove panels would poignantly provide substantial warmth in winter mornings when I cooked oatmeal with milk with the window mildly ajar, allowing fresh but below-freezing air to sidle in.
I packed a cabinet with condiment, dried foods, oil and coffee, took a picture, and eventually decided to take pictures of all corners of the room for my family and friends to see my state of survival. I loathed the 70s curtains of huge flowers of dull orange, yellow, black and white. There were two Persian rugs, so old that there were balding in patches and matted on surfaces that persevered, hosting probably a thousand house-dust mites ready to take on bits of dead Asian skin. There was also a cane rocking chair which I realised on the first day did not rock properly. My Ikea self-fix bed was laid with a foam sponge mattress which had lost much of its spring and was wrapped with dull, tired sheets. Much of the furniture and furnish in the room was made of pinewood or was pine-coloured: my bed, the study-table, the small dinner-table and chairs, most of the walls, the ceiling, the cabinet, the closet and a long and slim table tucked almost invisibly beside my bed. The only exception was a faded velvet sofa with abundant space for two persons facing my food-and-utensils cabinet. I bought a second-hand TV one day and would watch it after dinner when I was semi-submerged in the sofa with some cushions as lacklustre as everything else about the room. The sofa and its accompaniments kept me contented and cosy like a fat king in an overwhelming throne.
My room, which had belonged to the son of my landlord, offered substantial comfort with more furniture than I could ask for (The son was stocky and sturdy like a rubgy player. I was not too entranced as he looked like he would have been the perfect tool to bash me up had he shaven his head). However, within a few days of settling down in Würzburg, I decided to regard my room with a caution both enlightened and vigilant: I felt that the pinewood planks generously piled in the room supported both life and death. I turned out to be right: when I first arrived it was so cold I would nestle against the old sofa before gathering the resolve to go out and face the varying sorts of cold outside; in mid-winter when it was common sense to stay at home, I would feel bloated and lousy from a heavy breakfast or lunch. Many a time I would be torn between staying warmly entombed in pinewood but still feeling lousy or letting the harshness outside shock my senses out of complacency. I usually opted the latter, making a detour only when a ferocious wind-chill numbed half my face and other members of my body or when my nose dribbled with utter abandon and my numb upper lip failed to signal about the mess.
Frauenland was a curious suburb as it was located on a series of gentle hills. Where Frauenland ended, vast, steeper slopes skied down to bigger, inter-town roads. Vineyards claimed these steep slopes, these cradles of the local wine. Grapes were harvested early for its sour juices to produce this light and cider-like specialty of the River Main region. The perimeters of Würzburg are intermittenly but so vastly lined with vineyards that in its expansion the boundaries of the city could only trickle out of the spaces between vineyards like water from a leaky pail, hence the uneven shape of the city like a tiny brilliant orchid with shrivelled petals. I seldom ventured on my own beyond Würzburg proper. When I did so in my first week in Würzburg, I was responding to an advertisement for a second-hand bicycle offered for DM80. The owner was an old lady who lived in the outskirt suburb of Randersacker (she pronounced it as 'Andersacker' over the phone and my confusion irritated her) two kilometers from vineyard loft Frauenland. Seeing that what separated Frauenland and the direct road to Randersacker was a vineyard, I decided to avoid getting round the vineyard but to cut through it. It was at first breathtaking to see descending slopes of vine before. I spotted a flight of stairs and took to it. However, the odd weed flanking the stairs soon turned into bushes of them ON the steps. By the time I realised that the narrow steps had probably been left unused by winemakers for years, it was too late to turn back and I was a short distance from the road, the remaining path choked with thorny weeds notwithstanding (which had bled my legs on a few spots by then). I also realised that I was probably trespassing and briskly manoeuvred my way out. When I finally arrived at the old lady's house which fortunately was easy to locate, I had already been caught in a rain which fell during my long, shelterless walk along the noisy road to Randersacker, unnervingly close to speeding vehicles. After paying the cranky-looking old lady, I rode the reasonably well-functioning bicycle back to my vineyard loft where I nursed the trauma of bring wounded by unknown, foreign thorns and of getting drenched in a much colder climate.
The first and last time I tasted wine of the Würzburg region was when my landlords (with her husband who worked for Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway) invited me to the cosy and claustrophobia-inducing hall for a post-dinner drink. On top of butter cookies and grapes, the family Keupp offered me wine in the much-celebrated 'Bockbeutel' - a name for the cider-wine arising from the characteristic odd shape of the bottle quite unlike those of other wines - a round, flattened body leading to the usual cylindrical neck. The unknown corners underneath my cheeks were abruptly discovered as I gingerly took the first sip. Through soured senses, I tried my best to satisfy my landlords' reasonable curiosity: how was the place I came from; how I had the rudiments of German enough for insincere, small talk; and what I planned to study at the university. I knew they felt the necessity to understand my background, both financial and personal, to gain some confidence in having me live one wall away from their bedroom. While the wine session ended on a good note, I regretted that I had failed to get sufficiently tipsy to appear social and devastatingly confident. I was also mildly disturbed that grape-cider should have been allowed to pass off as wine and its sourness accorded regional pride. Surely that was tyrannical elongation of the spectrum of the kinds of wine from centuries of redneck insistence that it was innovation. For if grape-cider could pass off as wine, grape juice could be regarded as non-alcoholic wine and still be beamed about pompously.
As there was no showering facility in my kitchenette-cum-toilet, I had to share it with the couple living one floor below me. Julia had lived in the room below with another girl from the university for a year, sharing the spacious bathroom and a proper, adequate kitchen. When the girl moved out, Julia's beau, Stefan moved in and they converted the whole space - one bigger than mine - into a comfort zone of a style which I still don't know is unique or belonging to a modish European sub-pop-culture - a marriage of Gothic with chillout. It was a style I had never encountered before. As Julia cooked in the kitchen, in her bedroom, a wooden two-foot tall figurine of Mary with a piously tilted head would be lit by a red bulb at her feet. Music with groovy, prominent beats entranced the dim room. The effect was not eerie but anesthetising and inhuman like a richly perfumed foreign tea, the scent shocking and unrecognisably synthetic.
I could tell the couple obviously had a sedentary lifestyle as on the narrow staircase on Sunday afternoons I would bump into a Julia with straggly hair, languid eyes and light but ripe, almost pulsating eye bags. In a way she was like many older Germans who stayed in their narrow homes over the weekend trying to sleep away the lethargy, not knowing that it was precisely a sluggish lifestyle that caused the lethargy - a condition that I was familiar with having had spent years of my life as a student in physical inactivity.
Julia was nervous when Frau Keupp introduced us on the first day of my arrival. We arranged - in my halting German - the time I would descend from the third floor to use her shower-room. Any time else would be a disturbance in her opinion (...sonst stören Sie mich). They were slightly surprised to learn that I showered in the evenings; I was later to realise that in colder seasons most Germans showered in the morning and not in the evening so as to bring the residual body warmth of the day to bed. As we talked further about enrolment into University of Würzburg, Julia shifted her weight between legs, her arms crossed over her chest defensively. She was at moments concentrated like an interlocutor giving street directions but at moments withdrawn in her languidness, like an abruptly awakened cat. Or more appropriately like some character with a past in a European arthouse film. A woman more luxuriating in dark moods rather than being tormented by them. A recluse too afraid to even draw the curtains but whose seclusion is predictably disrupted by an anti-hero.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
sad
thoughtful
peaceful
listless
nauseated
numb
tired
loved
pleased
hopeful
giddy