Just like Steve McQueen
This is part two of this post, click on the link if you haven’t read it or this will make bugger all sense.
Living with Frau Fuka was bad enough for the first three months but in the last six months the seriousness of her crimes went up a notch or two.
I have mentioned that Fuka liked to keep tabs on me and my flatmate Gerty when we came in and out of the flat we rented from her. It would be too generous to assume she did this because she cared about us.
If her need to follow our every move was, indeed, out of a sense of motherly duty, it would not explain her little white head popping round my bedroom door as me and my boyfriend at the time took advantage of an afternoon off work. Maybe she felt the need to offer me some bedroom tips, but really …couldn’t she have waited til afterwards???
The sight of her muppet prototype, craggy, Band-Aided, little face whilst in the throes, has since made me muse upon how remarkable it is that I have gone on to have subsequent relationships and have even managed to procreate. People have been in therapy for less.
Motherly duty would also not explain why Fuka felt the need to examine my pants drawer on a regular basis whilst I was at work. Her supposed concerns about the neatness of my laundry did not expand to letting us using her washing machine or even letting us have a washing machine of our own. So I was stumped as to why my pants were being checked whilst I was out.
One day when I walked in on her rifling through my drawers, she made no attempt to apologise, claiming that it was her responsibility to check the flat was being well looked after. I offered her the chance to check the pants I was wearing since she was being so thorough. She said she felt that would be unnecessary. Germans don’t get sarcasm.
Meanwhile Fraulein Gerty, my flatmate had nothing but sweetness and light directed towards her. Why? Simple reason; Gerty’s boyfriend was a nice young local German boy who drove a nice new BMW. My boyfriend was a foreigner.
From the moment Gerty introduced Frau Fuka to Markus, her life was sweet. Whereas Fuka did not even like Sal, my second generation Italian, being in the building. She made no bones about this.
So it fell to me and Sal to flagrantly flout Fuka’s no foreigner rules on my last ever night at the flat. He stayed over and in the morning I walked him past Fuka’s door on the way out to say goodbye. Looking upwards as I stood on the street, I could see her little white fluffy head poking out the window. We both waved at her.
By the time I returned to my flat Fuka had let herself into my flat and was waiting on me, clutching my cassette radio like it was the Holy Grail.
She wanted money. She wanted me out. She wanted to call the police. She knew people who could stop me from leaving Germany.
She was maybe having a flashback with that last one. As far as I know these days Germany is a democratic society where people can only be held for committing actual crimes- shagging a foreign bloke not being a breach of any known current German law.
She would hold my radio ransom until I paid for her to replace the mattress! The mattress? The mattress! Oh, for pity’s sake!
I told her to phone the police. And that it might be a mistake given that she was the one stealing my radio. I reached over and wrestled the radio from her little white-knuckled hands.
I left an hour later asking a frozen faced Fuka if I could expect to meet any problems at the border. Just like Steve McQueen. She ignored me. Then I said, for a laugh, that if ever I were back in Germany that I would pop round for a cup of tea.
“ I will see to it that you can never return to Germany!”, she shouted down the street at me.
The hex was cast.
