Hanna Milojek

All I Wanted

Memoir extract

Chapter One

For a long time, I dreamed of living in an attic room. I imagined it would be small and bright and modest, just big enough to fit a bed in, and it would surround me like a cocoon. Whenever I passed houses with gables, I wondered what it would be like to live there. I imagined waking up behind their windows, which were sometimes rectangular, sometimes round and sometimes oval like a sleepy eye. Still half dreaming, I would watch people pass by on the pavement below, slowly coming to my senses. The idea of being able to look at things from above seemed very desirable to me, perhaps because it was a time when I felt low. 

Whilst dreaming of my attic room, I sat unhappily in my flat in Hamburg, which was not a cocoon at all. It was the end of November and though I turned the heating up, there was a coldness in the flat that had nothing to do with temperature. I was not sure why I had moved there in the first place, as I didn’t like it. It was more spacious and less expensive than my old flat, but it lacked character. The new flat was located in an apartment block from the postwar era. Through the bars in front of the windows, I could see into the flats opposite, which were exactly like mine: from a long, dark corridor, two rooms of identical size branched off on each side. This functional division seemed brutal to me. 

I was convinced that my life would improve if only I lived in the right place. The surfaces surrounding me were determinative of who I could be and what I would be able to think. On my bedside table lay a copy of Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, in which the French philosopher analyses the poetic quality of different spaces. In one chapter that I found particularly intriguing, he writes that the Hunchback of Notre Dame only acquires his hunchbacked form by living in the bell tower. Accordingly, I believed that the longer I stayed in my flat, I would gradually take on its shape. I would become dull, grey and uniform like the apartment block I lived in.

To escape my flat, I started visiting the shopping centre which was near my old place. Without knowing the reason, I kept directing my steps to the bright brick building. At first, there was nothing unusual about stopping by once or twice a week. But gradually my visits became obsessive. Under the pretext of buying a candle or a bar of chocolate, I haunted the narrow side street almost every night after work. Sometimes I looked forward to these excursions all day. It became a hobby to think of things I might need. ‘Pot cleaners’ or ‘toilet paper’ I wrote on my shopping list with neat handwriting and an anticipation I could not quite explain. Maybe going there was a way of revisiting earlier, happier days. Or maybe, at a time when I didn’t quite know what it was that I lacked, it felt reassuring to be surrounded by everything you could possibly want. I liked gliding my fingers over the piles of envelopes in various sizes in the stationery shop on the first floor, or riding up and down the escalators and watching the steps get flatter and flatter. 

At home, chaos surrounded me. Scattered around my bed were banana peels, half-eaten bowls of cereal and books from which I took turns reading three pages at a time. One of the books was an essay called Out of the Sugar Factory by the Swiss writer Dorothee Elmiger. In it, Elmiger writes about the history of sugar as well as the story of her own desire. It occurred to me that I had never read anything like it from a female perspective. 

When I saw him, C., for the first time, he was standing on an escalator or walking along the edge of golden fields, she writes. This image touched me, though I couldn’t have explained why. It was as if it reminded me of something yet to come. 

Among the other things I read was a small book by Etel Adnan called Journey to Tamalpais, in which the artist makes an almost obsessive pilgrimage to Mount Tamalpais every day and describes its changing colours. 

This morning, Tamalpais has many shadows, she writes, for example. In the vast expanses of grey, there is something translucent like a possibility. In another place she writes: Often, when I drive back over the Richmond Bridge,at a certain bend, when San Quentin is just behind me, something happens, there is a double movement: the lateral one of the car and the vertical one of the mountain that seems to rise from the ground.

It was a velvety December night when I first saw the tea vendor. I was riding down the escalator in the shopping centre, humming a song I had heard on the radio. Festive lights were already glowing in the background. The slow movement of the escalator, the blurred lights and the general absence of thoughts had a soothing effect on me. Only a few customers were still browsing the shops and slowly made their way towards the exit, where the darkness would envelop them.

I noticed his tall, slender figure at the tea stall when I turned into the aisle from the escalator. He was just putting something on the bottom shelf and bent down, his long hair falling at a 45° angle. Despite bending down, he inexplicably seemed to maintain an upright posture. In his grey, rumpled shirt there was something translucent like a possibility. He was completely absorbed in his task and yet seemed to keep an inner distance from it. This gave him a dignity I thought I had never seen before. 

In that moment, several things came together. It was as if there were a broken mirror in my chest that I had never known existed, but which now made itself known by its shards being pushed back together and snapping into place with a gentle click. A double movement had occurred: The diagonal movement of the escalator met the horizontal line of the aisle and the vertical one of his tall body. Filled with a swinging feeling, I left the building. I kept it all the way home, along with the fleeting image of the shop assistant, his strangely familiar slender silhouette, long hair and gracefully arched brows.

From then on, I made a pilgrimage to the tea vendor every day and observed his changing colours. Once he wore a dark blue jumper reminiscent of the shady flanks of the mountain. Another day he was dressed in a pale red shirt the colour of mist illuminated by the morning sun. 

For months, I rarely thought of anything else but the tea vendor, the delicate moles on his right cheek and his silky hair he often wore tied in a knot. I imagined he woke up in a small attic flat each morning from which you could hear the seagulls calling. The windows would look out onto white roofs and dusty tea tins would pile up in the kitchen. I went through all the names I could think of, but I couldn’t come up with any that would have been beautiful enough. Almost every evening, I walked past the stall and cast longing glances at him. Through the display of Chinese teapots, I watched him gracefully weighing tea, stroking back a strand of hair, wishing someone a nice day. I bought Assam, Oolong and Lapsang Souchong, Genmaicha, Sencha and Hojicha until my tea shelf was overflowing. But I didn’t dare to approach him. 

February, March and April crept by without spring entering my life. Although I could see the pink blossoms of a cherry tree in the courtyard from my window, my days remained colourless. I was slowly slipping into depression. At some point, even going for walks did not help any more. I felt so low that I had given up the idea of ever talking to the beautiful tea vendor and trudged around the area, unable to escape my gloomy mood. On the soles of my shoes, I carried the cherry blossom petals into my flat, where they turned into a muddy brown mush after a short while.

Returning from one of these joyless trips, I saw a sign right next to my entrance that I had somehow never noticed before. It showed a black-and-white photo next to a block of text. Even though the text was short, it took a long time for the information it contained to get through to me. I set my shopping bag down while I read the sign over and over again. Afterwards, I was so exhausted that I sat down on the steps in front of the entrance door.

What I had learned was this: Where my flat was, there had once been a prison. Originally built at the turn of the century as an annex to what was then the Altona Regional Court, during the Nazi regime it became the so-called Wehrmachtsuntersuchungsgefängnis, where political opponents were imprisoned and sentenced to death. During the Second World War, the prison complex was destroyed, and 15 years later the construction of today’s apartment blocks began on the former prison grounds. I wondered how I could have passed the sign every day without noticing it. Now that I knew my living area was a former prison yard, it seemed impossible to miss. 

I tried to imagine how the convicts had looked through the bars in front of the windows onto the yard, as I was now, how they had paced restlessly up and down in their cell, as I was now in my room, or how they remained motionless in one spot, as I was now. Could a place somehow store a memory of the things that had happened there? Was it possible that a tiny fraction of the suffering of the people who had once been imprisoned here was being transferred to me? Or was I just looking for a reason for my own discomfort in the history of the building? 

While the cherry tree lost its blossoms and spilled them out onto the courtyard as a fluffy carpet, I would lie in bed wrapped in my blanket for hours, unable to move while my thoughts went round in circles. Lying in bed, I dreamed of a better, freer life, where the sun would shine through my little skylight all day and where I would be someone else – a freer, fully developed person, someone who was where she wanted to be, who did what she wanted to do. 

In this state of lightlessness, my dreams took on clearer and clearer form, so that they seemed to become more real than the walls that surrounded me. In the darkness, I saw faces in the patterns of the woodchip wallpaper, pitiful beings with mouths agape, who seemed trapped in a false dimension just like me.

Sometime during this period, a friend called me. She had booked an accommodation in London for the following week, but she couldn’t go. I had wanted to visit London for a long time, but apart from a day trip as a teenager, I had never been there. Now it seemed to me that this city, which I imagined to be full of shimmering possibilities and simply furnished attic rooms, was exactly the right answer to my situation.

The prospect of the upcoming trip finally gave my stagnant life a direction. While I meditated on my packing list and sat on the floor, shifting small piles of folded T-shirts back and forth, I sang along to a song called Mornington Crescent. I imagined getting off at Mornington Crescent station, and the street would be drenched in blinding sunlight so that I would have to shield my eyes. The possibilities would, as it said in the song, suggest themselves to me.

When I entered my accommodation in London, the afternoon sun drew a bright diamond on the floorboards. On a worn wooden table, there was a very English-looking toaster and a packet of breakfast cereal. The breadcrumbs on the tabletop were glowing in the sunlight. It was perfect. 

I spent my days walking along the sunlit streets. Everything in this country appealed to me, from the shape of the beer glasses to the size of the pillows. I fell in love with the terraced houses, whose walls were much thinner than in Germany. Even the time zone seemed more in line with my natural rhythm. Visiting London felt like coming home.

When I was back in my unloved flat in Hamburg, I felt more displaced than ever. Sitting on my windowsill, I looked longingly up at the planes in the sky, their bellies shining brightly in the sun. I desperately wanted to be on one of them. All I could think about was how to get back to the other side of the English Channel.

In nightly internet searches, I looked for escape routes from my life. Again and again, I called up the outline of Britain on the map, pale and trembling on the light blue ground. Eventually, I applied to study in London, which I thought sounded like a proper reason to move to another country on a whim. From my bed, I worked on the multi-step application process. I prepared for a language test and practised pronouncing Leicester, Gloucester and Worcestershire. I gathered documents, transferred a ridiculous amount of money, hung on phone queues and wrote emails which I signed first with Best Regards, then with All the best and then with xx. I begged the universe that I would get my place at university. Finally, I got it. 

I could not see what was ahead of me, but that was exactly what I wanted. I gave notice on my flat and sold my furniture on eBay. With each piece that was carried out, I felt a little more liberated. I needed to become light, prepare to take off. For hours I sat on the floor and sorted out my belongings. Every item, no matter how small, was examined for its necessity in my future life. When I thought of this life, all I could see was an arched opening with glistening light behind it. I could only think up to the date of my departure, which I had marked in yellow on my calendar. But I was sure that in London I would find the bright attic room I had dreamed of.

This turned out to be more difficult than expected. For weeks I scrolled through endless lists of rooms far outside the city centre that were even more depressing than my flat in Hamburg. Some days I was so worn down by these searches that I considered abandoning my plan. One Sunday, I took time off from my room search. I made myself a coffee and resolved to do nothing. 

As I sat on the windowsill in the kitchen drinking my coffee, the room I wanted slowly took shape again. I saw its whitewashed walls, the light falling through the skylight onto the floorboards and the dust dancing in the sun. I saw the spiral staircase leading up to the attic room and the bed waiting for me under the window.

The next time I scrolled through the offers, it was suddenly there. The room I had imagined. There it was, a small, white attic room with sloping ceilings, as if I had called it into existence. Over the bed was a slanted skylight, through which the sun fell onto the floorboards. 

I immediately wrote a message to the landlady. An hour later she called me. Through the crackling line, her voice sounded a little distracted and yet warm. Without a proper greeting, she started to complain about this and that: the mess on her desk, the condition of her health and life in general. It felt as if we had known each other for a long time. She told me how sad she was to lose her current tenant, a young art student named Tung with whom she had shared a common love for wine, cigarettes and a certain book by Gaston Bachelard, the name escaping her at the moment. I was not even very surprised. For an hour, we talked about Bachelard, Norwegian churches and all sorts of things. Her name was Deborah, she was in her mid-sixties and had once been an actress. When we switched on the video, I could see she was still wearing her velvet morning gown. There were wisps of grey mixed in with her dark curls, but her eyes were alert and sparkling. Finally, she took me up the winding staircase to the attic room. 

‘It’s not very big,’ she said. 

‘It’s perfect,’ I said. 

‘What do I do with all the people who wanted to see the room,’ she asked, ‘Shall I tell them not to come.’  

‘Yes please,’ I said. 

A few weeks before I moved, I remembered about the tea vendor. The fact that I would soon be getting on a plane somehow made it easier to approach him. So one day in late August, I came back to the shopping centre and bought some tea.

‘Would you like your receipt?’, he asked me. I quickly checked who else was in the shop. There was an elderly customer with a ponytail contemplating two teacups, and a second employee, weighing tea. I fancied my chances. There wouldn’t be any other one. ‘Does it have your name on it?’, I asked. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even smile. He just reached for a pen and bent down in his graceful way to write his name on the back of the receipt. There it was, in airy letters that almost seemed to dissolve. And underneath, even more unbelievably, a phone number.