Tag Archives: Kate Ferguson

Do we need robot lawn mowers?

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This year, due to the pandemic, the furthest I could travel was to the state of Brandenburg, just outside of Berlin. While there, an encounter with an inept robot lawn mower made me question the advantages and pitfalls of automation. This post originally appeared here.

On a recent visit to the German town of Rheinsberg, my husband and I stayed in a charming bungalow with a beautiful garden whose central feature was a wooden swing which hung from a large, old tree.

The young man who greeted us on arrival was solicitous, guiding us through a well-stocked country-style kitchen, a cozy living room lined with books and a map detailing the main attractions of the town.

Just as he was preparing to leave us to settle, he issued an apology. “I’m sorry about the grass,” he said.  “We’ve been having some issues with our mower.”

Not that we would have noticed ourselves, but the lawn did indeed look a little unconventional, with streaks of wild growth co-existing alongside impeccably trimmed sections.

He motioned in the direction of a hedge, where a small, disc-shaped machine was parked. “It’s not performing as it should,” he said.

Over the course of our three-day stay, the robot lawnmower became an uneasy presence in our lives. Once, as we were enjoying a dinner of tortellini on the terrace, I got the fright of my life when from the corner of my eye, I spotted a free-roaming object emerge from the shadows and begin to roam clumsily around the lawn.

The garden, with its unforeseeable bushes, swing and tree was a challenge to the machine, whose response to unfamiliar objects was to back off, startled only to pursue doggedly an alternative course. The result was an intensification of an already comically irregular pattern.

The more conscious we became of our own robot lawnmower, the more we noticed its brethren elsewhere on our travels. In the lakeside town of Bad Sarrow, its kind were abundant, often employed to manage the lawns outside restaurants and villas. In some places, signs had been erected to warn passers-by to heed the machines. Their creeping whirr became a soundtrack to our waterside drinks.

Like many others I suspect, I have an ambiguous relationship to automation. I marvel at robots performing complex surgery, disposing safely of bombs and reducing time spent on boring, repetitive tasks. At the same time, I shudder in horror at the idea of Amazon’s unstaffed grocery stores, where cameras monitor your every move and sensors identify how many packets of tofu you pick up. Similarly, I am frustrated by my own propensity to feed big tech companies with my data, only to complain when it is spat back out at me in the form of uncannily appropriate advertisements for electric pianos, nipple cream and furniture I can’t afford.

If automation was on the march before the pandemic, it has now accelerated into a gallop. According to the International Federation of Robotics, COVID-19 has been the single biggest driver of change within the industry. At a time when human-to-human interaction became hazardous, nothing else was to be expected.

With so many people still suffering because of the virus, it can seem like a luxury to discuss more abstract questions, like what trends represent progress and which regression. But we are doing ourselves no favors by neglecting to observe the bigger picture, especially during a crisis.

Over the past few years, there have been some spectacular examples of the failures of automation. The two Boeing 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 which killed 346 people were caused by a software problem that lowered the nose of the plane, causing the pilots to lose control. Human failings, including cutting costs on safety were undoubtedly also to blame.

LSH and me in Rheinsberg after a discussion about the shortcomings of robot lawn mowers

A similar shortage of investment in humans alongside technological advancement has led to spectacular failings in social media algorithms too. In 2019, Facebook’s content moderation system failed to detect the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, resulting in a 17-minute live video of the horrifying incident being streamed on its platform.

These are two extreme examples of failed automation. But even in more benign cases, it’s worth asking: does the benefit outweigh the cost?

In 1997, we learned that a machine could beat the world’s best player at chess. Nearly a quarter of a century later, we have not developed a tournament for machines, and the name Garry Kasparov slips off our lips more easily than Deep Blue, the computer that defeated him. Perhaps this is because chess, unlike work, acknowledges human fallibility as a key component of its modus operandi.

Naturally this brings us back to lawn-mowing. As I watched the robot discs bumbling their way across pastures, bumping into hedges and loungers like an apprentice gardener plagued by performance anxiety, I realized I had been overlooking one of the most essential qualities of automation : a near-human capacity for imperfection. As we rush to share more pastures with our robot colleagues, we would do well to take heed of this particular characteristic.

How to write a novel

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This post first appeared here.

The first thing to do is take a walk. The road ahead is long and hard and paved with self-doubt. Might as well get some fresh air.    

The overwhelming odds are the world won’t take any notice. There’s a pandemic to think about. Also ironing, Instagram, climate change and Netflix. 

Accept this as the likeliest outcome and do it anyway. You cannot fall in love with a person while being obsessed with how to sell them. The same applies to your novel.

What you should think about is that kernel in your head. That impulse you feel to write. Where does it come from? Maybe you saw a rat crawling through an upturned trashcan on your way to work. Maybe there’s a fully formed alternate universe floating around in your head. Maybe you have always wondered what it would be like to have been born a different person in a different time. Whatever it is, interrogate it. Dig deeper. 

For me, it was Frau P. We met shortly after I moved from Ireland to Germany in 2012 and until her death in 2018, we saw each other once a week. We were seventy years apart but that didn’t stop us from being besties. If anything, it strengthened our bond.  

My novel is not about her. But it is informed and inspired by how it made me feel to sit with her in her nursing home room. Chatting about the price of pears. Her upcoming death. Germany’s political landscape. The care-workers’ private lives. Meandering between the quotidian and the profound.

This was the space I wanted to occupy. But it was not yet a story. 

I began writing my novel in 2016 and most of the time, I was miserable. I was miserable because I was overwhelmed. Because I was overwhelmed, I became masochistic. If I had a day off work, I would tell myself that I must sit in front of my computer as if I were in the office. I would spend eight and a half hours staring at a blank screen. The only word that came to me was failure. 

I have since learned that this is the worst thing you can do. Guilt and shame do not produce powerful writing. Curiosity does. 

Different novels have different driving forces. Mine is character. I needed a plot that would take my protagonist on an emotional journey. Figuring the course out became my preoccupation. I would think about it at night. In the shower. On the train to work.   

The breakthrough came while reading Story Genius by Lisa Cron. Her theory is that every story is about a character confronting their misbelief. In order to have a misbelief, they must have experienced situations that strengthened their flawed perception of the world. Her tip was to write scenes that did just that. 

This exercise, more than any other writing advice I have ever got, injected life into my story. What are my characters wrong about? How did they come to that conclusion? What can I do to challenge their perception of the world? Some of the scenes I wrote in response to those questions became key moments in my novel. Others are no longer on the page but have added nuance to my characters. 

Writing fiction, more than any other craft I can think of, is an extraordinary balancing act between the conscious and unconscious. First of all, there are the logistics of time and place and character to think about. One of the things I did was print out a calendar of 2016, the year in which much of my novel takes place, and mark the events of the story as if they were real. 

This wasn’t strictly necessary. One of the great gifts of fiction is that time can fly. But verisimilitude and plausibility are important. Even if you are writing the most outlandish fantasy story, the reader must be able to trust the world you have created. All of this is the domain of your conscious mind.  

The unconscious, on the other hand, is the repository of ideas and sensations. I ignored mine for too long, focusing instead on my calendar and plot outline. They have their place. But they are no replacement for the stuff that lies deep within you. The things you don’t know are there until the words come out. 

Annoyingly, your unconscious cannot be summoned. But I have found that it can be beckoned. A film that moves you to tears. An injustice that fires you up. A good conversation with a close friend. A poignant passage in a book. Certain music. You need to feel something. Anything, almost. 

A year ago, when I was 38,000 words into my novel, promising feedback from someone who knows her stuff gave me a boost when I needed it. She had many nice things to say about my work but it was the way she articulated what was wrong with it that made me giddy with joy. The only way to improve your novel is to be able to define the gap between the actual and the ideal. A person who can do this kindly and with conviction, is a gift. 

Earlier this month, fueled by the solitude enforced by the pandemic, I wrote the final words of my novel. I can barely believe I got there. There were so many times I didn’t think I would. 

For the next few weeks, I am giving the manuscript some time to breathe and handing it over to others to read. After that the work will begin again. To write is to sculpt. The marriage of vision and precision. When all that can be has been done, it will be time to offer it to the world. 

Dispatches from isolation

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I had a friend in college. One of those brilliant, troubled types. A writer and a chemist. He used to make his own drugs. Ordered the  ingredients online. Mixed them in his bedroom. I remember sitting with him upstairs in Bewley’s one afternoon. He told me about roaming around at night, sleeping outdoors.

On the grass in Stephen’s Green another time, describing how it felt when all the colors and sensations around you melded into one. He came from a family of high achievers. His older siblings with their diplomas in frames all over his sitting room.

For his birthday once, he invited a small group of us to his house. We played Balderdash and Piffle in his bedroom. Then he brought out some tubes of paint, and asked us to fling colors at the wall. For years, I had this brown woolen cardigan with a small yellow paint stain that I couldn’t get off. His mother drove us home at 3 in the morning.

“If you had to choose,” he asked me once in Café Sol on Dawson Street. “Between never seeing anyone again but having the Internet. Or seeing a small number of people and not having the Internet, what would you choose?”

Naturally, he was considering the first. And I said, I mean, I know where you’re coming from.

We were young and stupid and dealing in hypotheticals.

It’s been around two weeks now. Most of it spent right here at the dining room table. My laptop and a cup of something. Often, with candles too. Little things. LSH works in the kitchen. He likes the bar table. He’s used to standing in his office. Suits me well. 

“So, we haven’t A/B tested that yet,” he says through the wall. The apartment is now filled with the voices from his conference calls.  Sometimes he comes out and his face is all different. He doesn’t know it. More self-possessed. A little further away than normal. A sense of purpose. His world is in our kitchen now.

Another day, he’s on the sofa, his head hunched over his phone in a professorial manner. I creep up behind him. The closer I get, the surer I am. I know those shapes and colors! I know that concentrated, contended expression. This is what middle-aged Germans do on the train after they have completed all the Sudokus in their flimsy puzzle books.

“You play Candy Crush?!” I say. I am beside myself. I had no idea.

A friend recently asked if there was anything that still surprised me about my husband. Sure, I’d said. But I hadn’t been able to think of a concrete example.

“I only just downloaded it,” he says. “It’s actually pretty good!”

“There’s no need to be defensive,” I say. “It’s just that all of a sudden, I feel like I barely know you.” 

I resolve to play Kebab world again. Make time, for the things that matter.

When we venture outside together, I am insufferable.

“Stop scratching your nose.”

“I wasn’t scratching my nose.”

“You absolutely were. You do it all the time.”

“Stop treating me like a 5-year-old.”

“Stop acting like one.”

“I think it’s because we can laugh at ourselves,” LSH says in bed one night. “I think we defuse arguments that way.”

“So you think that’s why it works? Because even though we are very different we can both laugh at ourselves?”

“Yes, Katzi.” He is tired. He does a good impression of my incessant questioning. Do you think I’m a good person? If you were an animal, what would you be? What two people would you most hate to be stuck in qurantine with? I am maddening to live with. But so is he.

Taking out the bins and hanging up the laundry have become thrilling activities. Sometimes we fight over who gets to do it. Occasionally, we do it together. Slowly, we are becoming better people.

I’ve been writing more. The other day, I was having trouble focusing. Felt all tingly and restless. I brushed my teeth. It changed everything.

“It’s easy to forget,” says LSH. One of the reasons I married him is because he is kind.

I haven’t had a haircut in much too long. I no longer wear makeup. I slouch in front of the computer in the same green cardigan every day. I am startling to look at.

bad hair

Social isolation has made me startling to look at.

In the outside world, people are dying. Across the road, in Rosmann, people line up in a neat, sad, socially distant line.

I listen to music really, really loud now. Sigur Ros when I’m writing. LSH says I hum along, really loud. He hears me through the door. “You must know you’re doing it,” he says.

I do.

The da-da-DING of Whatsapp notifications punctuate our days. We are not alone.

We chat on Zoom with five friends in Dublin. All of us in our sitting rooms or bedrooms. In this strange thing together. They tell us the street traders at home are selling masks now. My friend’s three-and-a-half-year-old teaches us some Mandarin he picked up at preschool.

Watching the news is always bleak. Never more so than now. But I indulge in small pleasures. Examining the travel books on the financial correspondent’s bookshelves. A medical expert’s spice rack. A political analyst’s balcony.

The clocks go forward.  “Look,” says LSH. He points out the window. We are on the sofa, watching Tiger King.  It is 7 o’clock. Still bright. 

I go to Edeka to buy ricotta. It is remarkably cold. I stock up on the essentials: triple chocolate chip cookies and a jar of kale.

The day after the clocks went forward, it snowed
Snow in the time of corona

Inspired by a friend’s kindness, I scan through a box of Lindt chocolates separately. “For you,” I tell the cashier. “As a thanks.”

Her face changes. I struggle to key in my pin number with my disposable gloves. I step outside.

It is snowing. The day after summer time began.

A winter wonderland. Thick, fluffy flakes, like you see in picture books.

I watch them swirl over the empty playground. Choosing which daffodil to land on.

I return home, disinfect my phone, put the ricotta in the fridge.

LSH is in the kitchen. Looking out the window at the snow.

playground

 

 

Watching the shopping channel and drinking gherkin beer in the Spreewald

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Last weekend, LSH and I took a trip to the Spreewald, an idyllic forest landscape  best known for its picturesque canals and high-quality gherkins.

We brought our bikes on the train, and cycled to a campsite where we rented a wooden lodge with a lakeside view. There was a small shop nearby that sold gherkin beer. On our  first evening, we cracked open a couple of bottles.

gherkin

It’s not that bad.

LSH practically spat his out in disgust, but he was just being melodramatic. If you’re wondering, imagine a bog-standard lager with a cucumber floating in it, and you have the flavor.

We toasted to a restful and restorative weekend that would leave us ready to embrace the challenges of everyday life with a fresh sense of purpose.

Less than twenty-four hours later, we were back in the lodge, splayed on the couch with a pain known only to those who spend 364 days of the year sedentary and then cycle for ten hours straight.

We turned on the television – yes, we were glamping – with the innocent intention of unwinding briefly while we rested our weary limbs.

There was no way we could have known that we would spend the next several hours transfixed by the shopping channel and that I would return to Berlin not rested and restored but fixated on the idea of buying “WC Zauber Pulver,” an extraordinarily potent powder which turns into a magnificent blue foam when you pour it down the toilet.

dweebs

Proper dweebs wear helmets in the Spreewald.

It was mesmerizing. I’d never seen anything like it! Just fifteen minutes, the woman said for a deep clean of your most poo-encrusted lavatory.

Well, she didn’t actually say the last bit, but it was heavily implied.

“Drop it all in in one swift motion,” she said, tipping the plastic cup into the toilet with all the confidence of a person who sells WC Zauber Pulver” for a living.

The transformation happened before our eyes.

“Why not deep clean the toilet brush while you’re at it?” she asked, popping it in.

As the foam filled the entire toilet bowl, an animation showed the deep cleaning taking place beneath the rim, too subtle for the naked eye to perceive.

“Just one bucket will last you a whole year,” the evangelist said. “And why stop at toilets? You can use WC Zauber Pulver to clean any kind of drainpipe!”

She popped some powder into a lonely free-standing sink in the middle of the studio.

“There’s nothing that cleans like it,” she said. “And available only today, for just €19.99, what are you waiting for? Pick up the phone. Oh no, stop! What’s my producer telling me? They’re going fast! We’re nearly sold out! If you want to get your hands on this product, you have got to act fast.”

The number on the screen was dropping faster than I could dial.

My heart was racing. In the background, the foam in the toilet had reached the rim.

“We need to get some WC Zauber Pulver.”

“No we don’t,” said LSH.

“We do.”

“We absolutely don’t.”

The woman returned to the toilet, and flushed. As if it had all been a dream, the foam disappeared, leaving the inside of the bowl as sparkling and pristine as freshly fallen snow.

“That’s incredible,” I said.

“You’re not actually serious?”

“I am deadly serious.”

“I can’t believe you’re falling for this.”

“It’s amazing!”

“Sleep on it.”

I did.

I still want to order an industrial-sized bucket of WC Zauber Pulver.

This is not a sponsored post. 

affe

I was much too enthralled by the WC Zauber Pulver demonstration to take a picture. But the shopping channel was also selling this worried-looking decorative monkey, which I thought to snap.

On bonnets and bunnies

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For the last three months, LSH and I have been washing our clothes and dishes in the bathtub.

At first it felt kind of rustic. I imagined myself in a bonnet, whistling as I wrung out a sopping pair of jeans.

But the glamor faded faster than the stains.

“This moving-apartment-melarky isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” I grumbled as I watched LSH arched like a cat over the bathtub.

“What?”

“This moving-apartment mel…”

But I didn’t finish because LSH likes to listen to podcasts as he scrubs the saucepan ferociously with a scouring pad.

haiku

This poem is about a very weird experience we had when looking for an apartment.

I took to writing poems instead.  Some are deeply personal accounts of ringing internet providers and power companies. Others chronicle the 76 times we traipsed between our old and new apartment with suitcases full of books we will never read. A select few are odes to the hot plate we borrowed from a friend.

Poetry can help but it is no replacement for the Internet, and so I kept calling 02. Months later, a young man from Bavaria arrived at our door.

He loooked exhausted.

It was hot that day, and there are 92 steps up to our apartment.

I should have mentioned that in one of my poems. Pathos is one of literature’s greatest powers.

“I’m not from around here,” he said, pausing to catch his breath.

“I know,” I said. “You’re from Bavaria. You sound like my relatives.”

“They’re so short-staffed in Berlin, they had to bring us up.”

Demand for basic digital infrastructure is high in the German capital.

But if you want something done, ask a Bavarian.

Within fifteen minutes, he had re-connected us to the world.

I didn’t think he wanted me to hug him though, so instead I asked: “Can I give you a Lindt bunny as a thank you?”

bunnies

LSH is excellent at displays.

“Pardon?”

“Would you like a Lindt bunny? As a token of my appreciation?”

“I don’t really like sweet things,” he said, his eyes widening in fright as he discovered the army of chocolate bunnies on the table behind me.

Let me explain.

A while back, I was having a tough day. In desperate need of attention, I fired off a flurry of self-pitying messages to LSH on Whatsapp.

He sent the right kind of emoji back and so I thought the matter was resolved. I was working a late shift and when I got back home around 1 am, I tiptoed into the bedroom, where LSH was in a sleepy stupor.

“Katzi,” he murmured. “I think I left the radiator in the living room on. Would you mind turning it off?”

Ugh, fine, I thought to myself. But does he remember what a tough day I’ve had? How emotionally exhausted I am?

I flung open the living room door and made a beeline for the raditator.

And then I saw them.

An army of bunnies. Lined up as if for a school photograph. Flanked by nougat eggs.

The radiator was off.

“You said you had a tough day,” LSH murmured as I burst back into the bedroom.

“How did you…. ”

“They were on special offer. Got some fierce weird looks on the S-Bahn though. The big one comes in a transparent box with a handle.”

There were always many reasons to marry LSH, but this is now officially in my top three.

Anyway, all that was a few weeks ago. Since then, even without the help of my Bavarian hero, my army has shrunk dramatically.

Now it’s only “Big Berta” who remains standing. Her bell is so loud that we used it to entertain the cat we recently babysat.

Berta watches us as we wash our clothes, and cook yet another batch of tortelli on the hotplate. She was there when the hat stand was delivered and when LSH heroically proved his masculinity by bleeding the radiator. She will possibly still be there when our kitchen is delivered.

She is a reminder, in more ways than one, that good things come to those who wait.

 

My wife The German Chancellor

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Hello! It’s been a while. I’m sorry! Life has got very busy. I’m still writing though. The story below is a piece published in The Wild Word today. It’s part of my “Other Half” fiction serial, where I consider the lives of those in the shadows of the spotlight. This time, I’m focusing on Joachim Sauer, husband of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. A professor of Physics, he is a notoriously private man. I was inspired to write this piece after hearing about the death of Angela Merkel’s mother Herlind Kassner. So here it is. Hope you enjoy: 

A year or so ago I developed the habit of writing snippets of thoughts down in a notebook gifted to me by a grateful student on the occasion of my retirement. You could say it’s an infantile thing to do at my age—I’m turning 70 tomorrow for goodness sake—but I find it helps me to make sense of things.

Today’s entry is short. It says: “The essence of a person is captured only in death.”

I wrote it this evening after getting home from my mother-in-law’s funeral in Templin. It sounds a bit pretentious, but I don’t know how else to put it. I’m a physicist, not a writer, and have often found the limitations of language a greater burden than the mysteries of atoms.

What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that even though I’d met Herlind many times, it wasn’t until her death that I felt I really knew her.

And it makes sense, when you think about it. The purpose of a funeral is to distill a person’s life. The agents that facilitate the process are a ceremony followed by a conversational exchange.

The one that stands out to me in this instance happened as we were standing outside the church waiting for the mourners to file out.

“Marianne Knechtenberg,” a middle-aged woman wearing a black floppy hat said as she approached my wife. “Your mother taught me English at the Volkshochschule.”

Angela’s face lit up. It’s extremely rare for her to be approached with such an ease of manner. “She treated us all to afternoon tea once!” the woman went on, touching my wife’s arm. “What did she call it again? ‘Linguistic practice through cultural immersion.’ And it worked! We didn’t speak a word of German for the entire hour. Frau Kasner was a wonderful teacher! We all adored her.”

Later, when Angela dropped a white rose on the coffin as it was being lowered into the ground, all I could think of was the look of pride and wistfulness on Herlind’s face as she watched Angela being made an honorary citizen of Templin back in February.

The memory set off a string of chemical reactions inside my body. You know the kind, if you’ve ever grieved yourself.

I looked at the ground and tried to find a pattern in the dirt and gravel. But instead my vision became blurred and I shook uncontrollably. It’s not a response I could have foreseen.

It just goes to show though, having spent years examining the importance of zeolites as agents of catalysis, I’m hopelessly illiterate when it comes to predicting changes of states outside of the laboratory.

Take the Berlin wall, for example. I was sure it wouldn’t fall! At least not during my lifetime. I simply expected to inhabit the uncomfortable terrain between not falling foul of the Stasi and being able to face myself in the mirror until the day I retired.

Was I critical of the regime? Of course. Was I prepared to agitate on the streets and risk prison for my beliefs? Not a hope. There is very little catalytic about me. I simply would have plodded on with my research. Observing change only on a molecular level.

I also failed spectacularly when it came to predicting the fate of both my marriages. I never expected to get a divorce for one. And I certainly never expected to end up married to the German Chancellor.

But even here, there were some minor catalysts along the way. When Angela and I married in the registry office in Berlin Mitte on December 30th, 1998, in the presence of nobody—not even our parents—the path for my wife’s political rise was cleared. Having tried and failed before, neither of us had much interest in embracing matrimony again. But in the end, Angela listened to the voices in her party that suggested she would have a smoother ascent if we did the honorable thing.

Twenty years on, I can’t say for sure whether or not it was a necessary catalyst. What I do know is that when Angela left physics for politics, she went from examining catalytic change to embodying it.

My failure to understand the difference between the two may have caused the largest intellectual and emotional gap in our marriage.

Nothing typifies the point better than the time I suggested she’d made an irrational decision by abandoning nuclear energy after the Fukushima disaster. She was furious with me and had every right to be. She’s a physicist! Of course she knew the probability of a nuclear disaster in Germany hadn’t gone up. But she had become a politician too. And that meant mastering a system more incomprehensible to me than anything I’ve ever encountered under a microscope.

The rules and vicissitudes of public life remain a bigger mystery to me than ever. Perhaps this is why, as I look back over my admittedly illustrious academic career, my inability to communicate my ideas to the wider public stands out as one of my greatest failings.

Granted, my research on separating gases was lauded in academic institutions around the world. But I wanted to show people that catalytic reactions can be found everywhere. There is no one that has not been touched by an atom, I used to quip! It pained me that no one outside a lecture hall appeared to care.

But what I’ve come to realize, now that I have more time to reflect and record my half-baked thoughts, is that catalysts operate in every walk of life.

They can be found at political rallies and dinner parties. In language and outside of it. In walls and outside of them.

And in whatever happened to my heart just now when Angela snuck up from behind to whisper “Happy Birthday ‘Achim” just before the clock I’d been watching on the wall struck midnight.

Melanija

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This piece was originally published by a great online literary magazine called The Wild Word. 

Nobody believed that I pushed Irena into the Sava. But I did. I didn’t even feel anything as I watched her flounder. I knew one of the boys would jump in to save her.

Her shorts and t-shirt were sticking to her as she scrambled back up the bank.  The boy who’d pulled her out tossed her a dry shirt. She draped it around her shoulders and stared at me. She was one of those people who looked prettier wet.

No one said a word at first. Then one of the boys spoke. “Melanija, what did you do that for?”

I could feel their eyes boring into me. Wondering what could have possessed a creature as delicate as me to perform such a brutal act.

She’d called me stupid. In class beforehand, under her breath. For insisting Milan was the capital of Italy. But anyone could have made that mistake. My mother was always talking about the shows there. All the magazines she brought home from work had spreads from Milan. It was a logical thing to assume. Why wouldn’t the center of fashion be the capital too? It was for Paris.

I shrugged. “I guess I’m too stupid to know.” The boys looked at me like they never had before. Some of them were impressed, I think. And others a bit afraid. Their worlds were opening up.

I was younger than my son is now when I threw Irena into the Sava. A good bit actually, now that I think about it. Definitely no more than ten. The memory came flooding back earlier when I got another invitation to our school reunion. Last time, in 2014, they’d sent it to my agent’s address. This time, the envelope was presented on a silver tray, along with some fan mail from schoolchildren in Uganda and a letter of appreciation from a group of women who support my husband. They put a lot of effort into curating my mail and even go the bother of resealing the envelopes after they’ve been checked. I appreciate those little touches. More than they know.

Dear Melanija, Please join us for an afternoon of reminiscing about our time at Sevnica national school. No special mention of my current situation, or of the logistical challenges attending would present. I folded it and slipped it back inside the envelope.  Surely, this must be the first time an invitation to a Slovenian school reunion had been screened by the US government.

Irena’s never spoken to the press. As far as I know anyway. But even if she did, what evidence would she have of what happened that day? There were no phones, then. And it would be easy to deny such a story. Most of what they write about me is a lie anyway.

I might even do it again, if I were back there, in the same circumstances. Irena was one of those annoying children who had lots of knowledge but no instincts. It was infuriating for her to think that she was cleverer than me. Especially when I knew that it was her destiny to be ordinary, and that it was mine not to be.

When I think back to that day, I realize that I’ve always been allergic to humiliation. It’s something I have in common with Donald. Even a glimmer of it makes us both ruthless. I think we recognized that in each other early on. Part of the attraction, probably.

But there are differences in our antipathy. These days, I can cope with ridicule. Let them paint me as vacuous. You don’t get to where I am with nothing between your ears. Where is Irena now? Teaching math in dingy classroom somewhere? Auditing accounts for a financial services company? I couldn’t care less how stupid she thinks I am. Let her mock my improbable fate.

Donald has no such composure. To him, laughter is as dangerous and foreign as Slovenian is. The principles of both languages are impossible for him to understand. He’d rather bathe in victimhood than be ridiculed. I’m the complete opposite. To me, nothing stings like pity.

The media is at its cruelest when it pretends to show compassion. The moment I batted Donald’s hand away, in slow motion. The way I stopped smiling when I thought we were out of shot. Miserable Melania, they say. She cried on election night.

People who think I’m sad or lonely have a mistaken view of what marriage is. A simplistic one, based on ideals they’ve read about in fairytales. The truth that the small-minded fail to acknowledge is that every relationship is a transaction. And when you have an instinct for business, like Donald and I do, you can see the beauty in the way marriage enables an exchange between equals.

And that is what we’ve always been.

Of course, there are power struggles. They exist in all equal transactions, including in ours. But in this particular, peculiar situation, I have the upper hand. We both know that. I would have no trouble walking, if the humiliation became too great.

I’m not like the other, dispensable members of his administration. Those who woo him with adulation, then anger him with gentle reason. For Donald, there is only deference and defiance. Anything in between he files under treachery.

Not with me though. Through the marital bond, I am afforded the freedom of thought. My husband’s brilliance, like that of many powerful men, resides in his simplicity. FLOTUS, he knows, can’t be easily replaced.

When the grab-‘em-by-the-pussy tape came out during the campaign, I called him disgusting and told him I was leaving. “You can’t,” he said. His face was red. His voice was soft. The words came out like a question.

I looked him right in the eye. “I will.” And he believed me. It’s why he married me. Power has nothing to do with following through. It’s about having the courage to craft a noose and to hold it around the necks, even of those you love.

Since then I’ve been calling the shots. New York until Baron finished the school year. My own schedule. Interviews, only at my whim. No more snatching migrant children from their parents. What is he, a monster?

The liberal media’s too blinded by my beauty to see my brains. But since they insist on painting me in their own image, I’d rather be ornamental than oppressed.

Ornaments are powerful. It doesn’t matter whether they are diamonds, wives, husbands or handbags. All are accessories with the possibility to harness the most powerful currency in the world: attention. To be looked at, feared. Envied, adored. Only hypocrites say the surface doesn’t matter. Even the ugly duckling turns out beautiful in the end.

It maddens me when people say I have been lucky. Implying that I drifted listlessly to the top. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everything I have done is a calculation. I had the looks. But if it had been something else, I would have capitalized on that. I don’t understand people who don’t make the best of themselves.

If you think I’m heartless, you’re wrong. Only the jealous would jump to such a conclusion. I would do anything for those who brought me here. My mother, who spent her evenings sewing me dresses from the excess fabric she picked up on the factory floor. Who wouldn’t let me leave the apartment unless I was looking smart. She knew what it was to be best. My father, who worked and worked so we could move up and out. From Sevnica to Ljubljana all the way to New York City. Never look back, he said. He, who came from nothing.

I remember once, when Baron was very young, my parents came to Manhattan. I’d been out with my mother for the afternoon and when we came back, the sitting room door was ajar. We tip-toed down the hallway and peered inside.

Baron was curled up on my father’s lap. They were reading from a book. Kaj je to?  – what’s that? my father said, pointing at a picture. And Baron babbled back at him in Slovenian. Then my father said something I didn’t catch. But whatever it was, it made Baron giggle and dig his nose into my father’s chest. And as my mother and I stood hidden in the doorway, she caught the tear falling down my cheek with her freshly painted nail.

Former classmates of mine have complained in interviews that I never answer their invitation to the school reunion. They’re held every five years in a restaurant in Sevnica, just around the corner from where our school once stood. They have always invited me, they said. Even before I was First Lady. But she never comes, they say. She doesn’t even bother writing to decline.

Well, here’s what I have to say to them. Not everyone in life gets stuck. Some of us move up. Some of us make the best out of ourselves.

And maybe there are times when I would sacrifice everything I have now to be back there. Among the timbered houses that line the hills along the Sava. Breathing in the dewy air I remember from my childhood. Re-walking the trail where I once twirled proudly in the skirt my mother sewed.

I’d go, you know. I really would. If only they could guarantee that Irena wouldn’t be there. But how on earth, could I, FLOTUS, get away with making such a demand?

* This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and situations as represented in this story are the product of the author’s imagination, and should not considered to be true or a statement of fact.

Why you should keep your mouldy shower curtains

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Last week Frau Bienkowski and I got talking about how best to dispose of Christmas trees.

I was telling her about how I’d been über-enthusiastic in undressing my tree only to find that the recycle people wouldn’t be coming to collect it until the following week. Since I live in an intimidatingly law-abiding neighbourhood, I figured I might face ostracisation  if I dumped it outside prematurely. As a result, I’d lugged it to the balcony where it was now in a sorry state of limbo, having left thousands of pine needles (perhaps out of spite, I thought) in its wake.

Nothing says "January blues" more than a pile of sorry-looking Christmas trees.

Nothing says “January blues” more than a pile of sorry-looking Christmas trees.

“I insisted on non-shed in my latter years,” said Frau B. “I just couldn’t deal with those needles.”

“So how did you get rid of your Christmas tree back in the day?” I asked.

“I just threw it out the window.”

“What?”

“Yes, would you not consider doing that?”

“No!”

“Why not? That way, you won’t have to clean up all the pine needles from the stairwell. After all, you don’t want to annoy the neighbours!”

I wonder if this individual removed all the needles of their tree one-by-one.

I wonder if this individual removed all the needles of their tree one-by-one.

“I can’t just throw my tree out the window! What if I hit someone? Like my crazy neighour? Or the 86 year-old Hausmeister?”

“I used to recruit children to keep watch,” said Frau B. “They’d stay below and give me a signal when the coast was clear. Then they’d carry it to the side of the road. I gave them chocolate in return. It was win-win.”

“I’m not doing that,” I said.

Fast forward a week and it’s Christmas tree removal day. A heap of sorry-looking Christmas trees has accumulated outside the apartment building. One individual, presumably with the admirable intention of not dropping a single needle in the stairwell, has even shorn their tree, leaving behind nothing but a creepy-looking skeleton of branches.

I enlist the urgent help of (resident savant) LSB.

LSB and his genius mouldy-shower curtain contraption. (MSCC)

LSB and his genius mouldy-shower curtain contraption. (MSCC)

He immediately makes his way to the bathroom, from where he emerges wielding the mouldy shower curtain we recently got around to replacing.

“Watch,” he says.

He lays the mouldy shower curtain on the floor of the hall and instructs me to lift the tree onto it. As if he were tucking a child into a hammock, he covers it gingerly, finally securing it with two firm knots.

Keen to get the credit for the ingenuity, I insist on carrying it down to the street myself.

I don’t shed a single needle on the way.

Later, when I relate the event to Frau B, she appears suitably impressed.

Merry Christmas, Frau Bienkowski

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“They’ve outdone themselves with the decorations,” said Frau B.

Word had it that some of the carers in Wohnbereich 4 had been up since 4 o’clock in the morning. The dining hall had been transformed into a winter wonderland, with baubles, fir tree branches and paper stars adorning the tables and walls. Someone even had the genius idea of hanging cotton buds from the ceiling to resemble a snow scene.

Most of the residents had dressed for the occasion. Frau B had on a navy jacket she’d sewn for herself at the age of 85. On it, she’d pinned a sparkling turquoise brooch. She’d had her hair done too.niko

I complimented her style.

“Katechen,” she whispered. “Have a proper look around. Later, I want you to tell me who you think is the most attractive person here. You’d better be honest though.”

The hired entertainer, an earnest man in a questionable cloud-patterned shirt, led the Christmas carol-sing-along. I heard Frau B join in to Stille Nacht. The lady next to me, who had been whimpering in distress only moments before, began clapping her hands on the table in delight as she hummed along pitch-perfect to the music.

“She has lost her Verstand [has dementia]” Frau Bienkowski whispered. “But occasionally, she has remarkable moments of recall.”

After we had polished off our Stollen (Frau B thought it was sub-par) and the entertainer concluded his festive repertoire, it was time for the exchange of presents. A carer in a Santa costume appeared on a sleigh carting presents for the residents.

“Ho, ho, ho Frohe Weihnachten, liebe Einwohner,” he said, enlisting the help of his colleague, whom he referred to as “mein Engel,” to distribute the gifts.

From observing those around us, we figured out fairly fast that Frau B was likely to get either a large animal-shaped heat cushion or a desk calendar.

It was the latter.envylopy

We had arranged earlier that we would exchange our gifts privately. This was after all, only the nursing home party, not our own.

Later on, back in Frau B’s room, she handed me an envelope. On it was written, in a scrawl I have come to know well, “Katechen.”

“I can’t see what I write,” she said. “So, I was quite impressed that I got any letters down at all.”

She made me promise I wouldn’t open it until I’m back in Ireland on Christmas Eve.

I handed Frau P a bag containing an assortment of perishable gifts. The hamper included a slice of mackerel, two bottles of Berliner Kindl beer,  a box of Lindt chocolates and some organic (it is Christmas, after all) apples.

She told me to hide the beer at the back of the cupboard.

“I’m not going to drink it alone,” she said. I took that as an invitation for a beer date in the new year.

Back in the quietness of the room, I asked Frau B how she had been feeling this week.

“Terrible,” she said. “I really thought my time had come. I was convinced I was going to close my eyes one final time.”

We looked at each other for a long time.

And then it passed and she asked me who I honestly thought was the most attractive resident in Wohnbereich 4.

 

Gambling on the American Dream

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Newark train station, New Jersey.

Homeless men rush to open the door for you. Then, looking you right in the eye, say: “Do you think you could help me out, Ma’m? Spare a few cent?”

Inside, unfortunate people sleep with their belongings on the grand benches in the waiting hall. Some stay  seated – their chins slumped against their chests, while others curl up in a fetal position.

But one woman, more than any other, captured my attention. She was old; seventy at least, with thin lips and narrow-set eyes.

She was very slight and unlike most people at the station, white. Her hands were gnarled; her fingers protruded at all the wrong angles.

She slept for an hour, her disjoined hand resting on the brown carrier bag beside her.

When she woke up, she hooked her hand under the bag and shuffled away, agonizingly slowly.

I watched her empty spot until she returned.  She had bought a packet of Doritos at the station shop. She formed a cup with her hand and dug deep inside the bag.

That’s how I left her as I eventually got up to catch a Greyhound bus to Philadelphia.

"20060627 Trump Taj Mahal from Pacific Avenue" by Original uploader was TonyTheTiger at en.wikipedia(Original text : en:User:TonyTheTiger) - Transferred from en.wikipedia(Original text : own picture). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Source: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20060627_Trump_Taj_Mahal_from_Pacific_Avenue.jpg#mediaviewer/File:20060627_Trump_Taj_Mahal_from_Pacific_Avenue.jpg User: TonyTheTiger

Trump’s Taj Mahal Creative Commons (c)User TheCatalyst31 originally uploaded by TonyTheTiger source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_City,_New_Jersey

A few days later, after my sister’s wedding, we decide to take a day trip to Atlantic City. Known as the “Las Vegas” of the retired, it is exactly as horrifying as it sounds.

Casinos, gaudy and gigantic, dominate the shoreline. Along the seaside promenade, you can see obese electronic wheelchair users stopping to charge up at designated points. It is a Monday afternoon in July and the casinos are full of elderly people, their eyes glazed over recurring pictures of fruit on the slot machines.

If you turn your back to the promenade though, you can take in the beautiful horizon over the Atlantic Ocean.

A handful of children are in the choppy water, jumping to catch the waves of a faraway ferry.

Every now and then a speedboat glides past. It’s got a large digital display board advertising a restaurant in a nearby casino.

On the way back to the station, I see from a distance a small hunched figure on a bench nursing an enormous soft drink. She has on a headscarf. Beside her is a brown carrier bag.

As I get closer, I recognize the gnarled hands and sunken face.

Maybe she has a pensioners’ travel pass. Or perhaps the ticket inspectors turn a blind eye because of her age. Maybe she does the commute between Newark and Atlantic City every day, just for something to do, or somewhere to go.

The American dream, I think to myself, has been one giant gamble.