Statement of Record

Au Pair

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Au Pair

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A novel excerpt by Cecilia Hansson

From Natur och Kultur, 2019, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson 

A BEGINNING OF SORTS 

When I go to Erstagatan to be unfaithful it is spring, and I am 31 years old. 
For four years I’ve been trapped inside a relationship, and this is me breaking out. 

He’s just someone who happened to come in my way. Someone in my philosophy class who told me my poetry collection Rib Days, Mornings is the best book he’s read and that he’d be quite interested in a power-play relationship with a slightly older woman. He invites me over for champagne, and then I’m free. 

My first move is a trip to Vienna. M picks me up at Schwechat, the airport that’s both grand and provincial at once. Our romantic relationship is long over; M has a steady girlfriend and I’m here to finish my second poetry collection. 

I’m calling it Stretch My Skin. A Transformation, and it’s about one single person—me. About the pain of waiting to burst, and about getting out. About being a teenager in a body that won’t conform to the norms of high school hallways. About choosing not to bend in the classroom, not even when that would be easier. About being a flower that grows outside its pot. 

M tries to kiss me already at Schwechat. He smells of beer and is missing a tooth from a car accident when he’d been drinking and lost his license. But he gives me a ride anyway, has borrowed the car just to come get me. 

We drive toward Laudongasse. I’m renting a room for a month from a woman who works as an assistant at the Department of Psychology. The apartment smells strongly of essential oils. My room is small and has a view of the backyard. 

Laudongasse is in Josefstadt, behind the university. The street runs parallel to Florianigasse with all the restaurants, and is situated in the heart of the bourgeois neighborhood, all stone buildings. This is the Vienna of Jelinek and Haneke. I’ve ended up here by chance; it wasn’t anything I requested when I signed up on Mitwohnzentrale

Further up the street is number 55. “No victor believes in chance,” Friedrich Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science

M parks the car, and when he kisses me I remember the time he came traveling to Sweden with a suitcase full of Fassbinder plays and romantic radio pieces. I was 21 years old and on summer break from theater school. The plan was for him to stay in Sweden, to swap theater studies for German language teaching studies, but it all ended with a fight about hashish and Sartre in my hot, stuffy student room in northern Östermalm. 

The first time I met M was at Café Alt Wien on Bäckerstraße. It was in May, almost a year after my failure as an au pair and my subsequent return to Sweden. 

The time I worked as an au pair and fell in love. That’s the story I want to tell. About Walter, the teacher in my language class at the university. He was everything I wanted: just as tall, handsome, and unobtainable as the guys on the basketball team in my hometown. But neither basketball player nor truly a language teacher—Walter was a PhD candidate in literature and worked as a culture journalist. Every girl in my class had a crush on him, but I almost got him. 

Later, when I returned to Vienna almost a year after my failure as woman, au pair, human, and lover. I had no intention of seeing Walter again, I had every intention of seeing Walter again. 

A day of pouring rain: I took the tram from Ottakring, the old working class district in west Vienna. I’d been struck by an intense longing for a particular museum in the city center. The museum turned out to be closed. I decided to go to Café Alt Wien. 

Café Alt Wien: where I had my very first date with Walter. 

I crossed Stephansplatz. It was Monday, it was afternoon. It was only a little less than a year after everything had subsided and suddenly I found myself about to walk straight into Walter. 

Him: dressed in a beige trench coat, no briefcase, leaning slightly forward as he walked. His eyes focused, in his own world. In one hand, an umbrella. The other hand, or arm, rather: around a woman. 

Me: standing, staring, on Stephansplatz. In the heart of Vienna, this poor heart of mine. 

That night: Café Alt Wien. That’s where I met M, who was doing his civilian service at Amnesty International. As tall as Walter, but a mere five years older than me instead of twelve.  

Theater studies instead of literature. A version of Walter, but still not. M, the child of a working-class family in Leopoldstadt on the eastern outskirts of Vienna, had not come here from the fields of southern Austria. 

Their eyes on me: couldn’t be more different in warmth. 

M drove me home to Ottakring, and as we swished through the city I thought: this is when it starts. Nevertheless, this story is not about M.  

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TRAVELS TO VIENNA 

1991 Interrail through Europe 

1992 Interrail through Europe 

1993 au pair, German language classes 

1994 vacation, met M 

1996 saw M 

1998 reporting trip (radio reportage about Austrian anarchists and right-wing extremism) 

2000 philosophy lectures 

2001 vacation with a lover 

2002 vacation with F 

2004 writing trip with Stretch My Skin. A Transformation 

2009 layover before hiking trip with B 

2014 reporting trips, German language classes 

2015 reporting trips 

2016 reporting trips 

2017 reporting trips 

2018 writing trip with Au Pair  

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AU PAIR 

When my heart is beating in step with time, when the chambers are parallel and of equal strength. That’s when I write the story about my time as an au pair. 

The first family I’m assigned is soulless and lives far outside the city. Three children, the oldest son is violent. Terrible atmosphere; they don’t talk to each other. 

Family number two is the exact opposite of the first. He’s an artist, she’s a mid-career psychoanalyst. Both obsessed with Freud. A three-year-old, deeply spoiled. 

In the third family I’m hardly an au pair; instead, they become friends for life. It is the mother who drives me to Wilhelminenspital and Allgemeines Krankenhaus when my heart begins to act up, my pulse is racing and the only things that help are anticoagulant injections and ECG. 

All of this is a summary of the story and at the same time it doesn’t even begin to tell it.  

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We’re lined up outside the entrance to our school, almost unable to sing the words in the graduation song. Twenty-nine girls dressed in white, girls who have been part of the school choir and who know everything there is to know about philosophy, psychology, and math. Who have spent lunch breaks and late nights studying history, German, French, English, and Spanish, who’ve produced theater plays and music shows. We know the full periodic system by heart.  

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Not one of us is afraid of bright summer nights, and none of us has ever had a boyfriend. But we’ve been there to comfort each other the times we puked in the line outside Cleo Nightclub. We’ve shivered through snowstorms together. We’ve pep-talked each other to defy the twenty-and-over door policy at Stadspuben, and sometimes they did let us in.  

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Now we’re dispersing. We’re moving to Paris, Nice, Marseille, Umeå, Madrid, and San Francisco. 

We’re not going out into the world; we are the world. 

Our bodies: like poet Karin Boye’s budding flowers. Ready to burst, untouched.  

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I’m the only one going to Vienna. The city of Bachmann, Wittgenstein, and Ernst Jandl. Where Kafka died and where Freud knew all about dreams. Where you can spend all day writing at a café, as long as you’ve paid for a Melange

In Vienna, the social ladder is hardly topped by high school basketball players, and nobody would choose a night at the hockey rink over a play at Burgtheater.  

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My letter to the au pair agency says that I enjoy early mornings and do well under stress. That I love reading stories to my cousins, that I adore taking care of children. 

I’d put anything in there, as long as they send me to an intellectual family in the city. I enclose a photo that shows me standing on the patio at home, wearing my graduation dress with the small flower print. 

The only thing that’s not a lie is my grades, that I have top marks in almost every subject.  

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Wet snow is crashing down from the sky. The envelope is postmarked in Vienna. I tear the seal before I’ve left the mailbox, protecting the contents with my body.  

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A standardized welcome letter. A contract, terms and conditions, insurance forms. A photo of a family with three children who live in a suburb called Hietzing. The dad’s name is Günther and he is Diplom-Ingenieur. The children are all boys. The only information about the mother is her name: Grethe. 

Snow finds its way inside my collar and my eyes are burning. I have to close them not to lose my footing.  

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The Wiener Philharmoniker’s New Year’s Concert, my whole family gathered in front of the TV. “Are you sure Umeå is out of the question?” my mom asks. “With your grades you could do anything.” 

She’s arranged student housing for me at Ålidhem and imagines me biking between the university library and Café Mekka. She wants me to go dancing at Scharinska, just like she did, and let writing remain a hobby.  

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Bright yellow signs in German and shiny floors. The Vienna airport is called Schwechat. Ads for schnitzel and operettas hang on the walls. I walk in the direction of the sign that says Ausgang. I try to look like the photo I sent with the letter.  

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My bags are the last to arrive on the baggage belt, heavy with books. One is difficult to pull, it seems like one of the wheels has broken. A customs officer helps me get the bags onto a cart. 

“Danke,” I say. 
“You’re welcome,” he replies, in English.

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A man in flimsy dress pants and a mustache comes up to me. Two children are standing behind him. They’re wearing identical winter jackets and their hair is uncombed. 

The man gives me his hand, introducing himself as Günther. We walk out to the parking lot. It’s colder here than at home. Günther stuffs my bags in the car. The children stare at the pavement. 

“They’re so happy they got to come, they’ve never been to an airport before,” Günther says.  

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Graffitied industrial wastelands and abandoned gas stations. Günther drives fast on the Autobahn. The children don’t say a word in the backseat. I can feel them staring at my neck. 
“How far is Stephansplatz?” I ask. 
“You can speak English if you want,” Günther responds.  

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The fan blows hot air straight at my face, but I still feel like I’m freezing. 

I swallow, hard. I turn to the children: 
“How old are you?” 
“Three and nine,” Günther replies. 

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There’s a security camera above the driveway to the family’s home. A Securitas car is patrolling the area. The intercom is brand new. 

It looks closer on the map, but I’m 14 miles outside the city.

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AU PAIR, II 

You don’t brag about having been an au pair. Everyone obfuscates the year they spent abroad in their late teens: “I studied French at the Sorbonne” or “I spent a year in London.” 

The almost shameful experience of having taken care of children, of having cleaned up the messes of others. An experience I was initially proud of, until I realized I’d better not be. 

I start writing the story about my year as an au pair when I’m pregnant with my own child. Maybe it’s a preparation for the household work that awaits during the parental leave. I put my shame aside, at least temporarily.

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Grethe meets us at the door. Her clothes are unfashionable and her front teeth protrude. Tired eyes, yellow skin. The children rip off their jackets and shoes as soon as we enter the hall. 

“Hi,” I say and extend my hand. Grethe nods and smiles at the floor. Maybe she’s shy.  

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“This is the boys’ corner,” Günther says and indicates an area further inside the hall. A third identical jacket hangs there, just a bit smaller.  

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Abendessen and nobody says a word. On the table: cold cuts, pickles, sparkling water, and bread. 

Wooden slabs instead of plates, no cutlery. Beer for Günther, water for the rest of us. As soon as the children have finished eating they scramble off. Günther pours more beer. He drinks, it gives him a foam mustache.  

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I am given a monthly transit pass, pocket money as per the agreement, and I can choose to take an evening language class. 

My work hours are between eight and one pm. No additional childcare. Günther and Grethe are always home during the evenings. 

My tasks: serve the three-year-old and the eight-year-old breakfast, watch over them when they play, make them lunch, and change diapers on the one-year-old.  

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The children need to spend some time outside each day. Fifteen minutes in the garden is enough. When the nine-year-old comes home from school I have to make sure he doesn’t attack his little brothers. For emergencies, there’s the VCR.  

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My room looks like my childhood room at home, just less cozy. A bed, a desk, a reading chair and a reading lamp. No curtains, just two white panels that cover the window. The bookcase is empty. 

My pillow is mushy and the comforter too warm. The room smells of newly oiled wood. It makes my nose itch.  

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It’s morning and the sound of someone showering in the bathroom wakes me. When the door finally opens Günther walks out with a towel around his hip. 

Floor, walls, soaking wet. A pair of big, loose pajama pants thrown in one corner. Skid marks in the crotch.  

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Breakfast is served in the kitchen. It’s cozier than the dining room, where the grand ceiling medallions clash with the furniture. 

Small pieces of crustless white bread in front of each child. There’s a mug of hot chocolate at my seat. A thin layer of skin has formed on the surface. 
“You like Kakao, right?” Günther says. 
“I can’t drink milk,” I say. “I wrote that in my letter.”  

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Grethe shows me how the microwave oven works. It’s brand new, just like the TV. 

The living room is furnished with two leather sofas that look like they’ve been around for a while, a bookcase with decorative objects, and the new TV. The video tapes are locked inside a cabinet.  

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Mondays: Pork Knödel
Tuesdays: Tin meat soup. 
Wednesdays: Fish sticks. 
Thursdays: Liver Knödel
Always pre-cooked, frozen, and from the same manufacturer.  

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Every Friday: Apricot Knödel. Like kroppkakor, Swedish dumplings with parboiled fruit. The children hoot with joy when the microwave pings. 

I’m allowed to take money from the money jar and buy whatever food I want to eat. But I only eat pasta, seasoning it with salt and butter.  

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In the playroom: the three-year-old pulls a puzzle from a shelf. It smatters when the pieces scatter in all directions. The one-year-old starts to wail. I have no other choice than to put them in front of the video player. Because what is this if not an emergency? 

The three-year-old stares at the Disney characters jumping back and forth. The one-year-old happily licks the remote control. When the movie ends I put on another.

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THE HEART 

That the body doesn’t forget. This I come to realize when I’m middle-aged, on a reporting trip for a book about the importance of art in Central Europe. The starting point is in Vienna. At a summer class at the university, a class I don’t really need. Or, well: I need it to find my way back to the German language, to the culture and the tradition. That’s what I tell myself. 

I rent a small apartment in Ottakring, near my third au pair family. It’s a fifteen-minute walk to Schottentor and Wiener Internationale Hochschulkurse für Ausländer. Formally, the class is a literary seminar, but it’s really a language class, though at the most advanced level. 

As soon as I step through the door my chest constricts. The long hallways, the stairs. The doors, which are all identical. The smell of cigarettes, floor soap, and dust. The toilets with their narrow stalls. It sends me twenty-two years back in time. 

The registrar’s computer has frozen and the line to register is at a standstill. I’m wearing foundation from Armani and a raincoat made by a Danish designer. Still, I feel like I’ve swallowed a needle. 

The teacher is in his fifties. Short and energetic, a professor of German Literature. Graying beard, sneakers, and jeans that sit too high on the waist. 

Worksheets organized in neat piles. Listening comprehension: on cassette tape. Everything exudes the nineteen-nineties, except for the flat screen TV on the wall behind the teacher’s desk. 

The classmates: a mix of retirees and students. The girl next to me is from Holland. Her cheeks are an eager but confident red. She’s staying in the student residence and spends her weekends ticking off the tourist attractions. 

On the break: I cross the street and drink a Kleinen Braunen at a café with eighties interiors. The rain keeps falling. 

I skim through our reading material and skip all the excursions. I arrive late to every class, but it doesn’t matter—being a Swede sets you apart, or does it have to do with the cut of my clothes, my inability to use the formal you? My abhorrence over Karl Kraus’s view of women, and my readiness to make this known?  

None of my classmates seem to understand that I have a child. How could someone spend three weeks away from a four-year-old? Who is taking care of her? My parents? Someone notes that Rabenmutter is the German term for mothers who abandon their children for their career. “My child has an active father,” I say. 

The course is coming to an end; the rain has not held up. The dankness settles on my skin. I finish all my tasks: I visit the Literature House, I email the authors I want to interview, I meet with feminist icon VALIE EXPORT who tells me about how she in the 1960s dressed in a pair of pants with an open crotch and walked into a movie theater in order to confront the audience with a woman in the flesh. Still, it’s as though nothing is enough. 

“I’ve taken a class here before,” I say. “It was twenty-two years ago, I was an au pair at the time.” The teacher says nothing, just nods. Does he already know everything? 

I FaceTime home. My daughter is not interested in talking, she just waves at the screen. “HI MOM.” Then she returns to her crafts; she’s constructing a rabbit family from cotton and toothpicks. 

“What am I going to do?” I ask my husband. 
“You’re in Vienna to explore your past, no?” 
“I thought I was on a reporting trip.”

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LAUDONGASSE 

I take the tram to Schottentor, walk up Universitätsstraße, turn right. Florianigasse, Lange Gasse, Laudongasse. I walk past the house where I wrote Stretch My Skin. A Transformation, past the sushi spot and the library. When I get to number 55 my body stops cooperating. 

It’s as though I’d never found the truth about being in Heidegger, never seen chaos become dancing stars in Nietzsche. Never experienced The Decalogue or Blind Chance or signed up for a Polish language class at the university. As though I’d never sat reverential in a movie theater watching Weronika’s heart break in The Double Life of Véronique or tried to dress like Irène Jacob. 

As though I’d never quit political science after just one semester to go to theater school, where I learned to stand on my shoulder and breathe telepathically through my energy centers. 

As though I’d never convinced the Swedish public radio channel to give me an internship, as though I’d never been a terrified 24-year-old who for six months produced a weekly two-hour live music program for a national audience. As though I’d never interviewed Diamanda Galás, the queen of everything goth and good. 

As though I’d never taken a writing class, learned German, or translated Monika Rinck’s poems and her incredible lecture Risk and Idiocy, about daring to be a free and creative subject. 

As though I’d never had boyfriends, lovers, a girlfriend, and various loose relations. As though I’d never stood licked against the wall of a building. 

As though I’d never moved to Berlin. 

Never married, given birth to a child, and written books. 

Or traveled to Shanghai with two photographers in divorce proceedings, met Laurie Anderson at a cocktail party in Paris, done karaoke with sex workers in Bangkok, or found myself in the middle of a porn film shoot in Hua Hin. As though I’d never called upon property rights when someone laid their hands on my poems, or wanted to write a dissertation on Georges Bataille. 

As though I’d never commuted by train to the Philosophy Department at Uppsala University to learn everything about Heidegger, or lain flat on a dock, begging for more. 

As though my body had never fully matured. My breasts never did grow to be truly generous.

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THE HEART, II 

It’s the very last few days of my summer class. 

In the mirror: eyes of a nineteen-year-old, the gaze a curious spear. Brown hair in bob cut. Coral lipstick. If you squint I look just the way I did 22 years ago. 

I log onto the university website. The pages take time to load. The information has not changed since last time I looked. There’s nothing about who teaches the summer classes. 

I can read about Walter that he teaches daytime and evening classes during the semester. That he has a master’s degree in literature, and a past as a journalist.

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THE HEART, III 

How it would play out at our first meeting after all these years: he would recognize me. We’d have a cup of coffee together, or even a beer. At his regular spot Miles Smiles, or someplace more trendy. 

We’d laugh about what had been, and that laughter would settle down like a warm blanket around our past. 

Everything I had written in the journal I later forgot in a phone booth on Währinger Straße. That journal, a record of every event that’s been etched into my skin. All that could come to rest, just like the waters of the ocean may one day come to rest.

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THE HEART, IV 

The classes have finished for today. The registrar’s office is closed, and the hallway smells of the dust of summer. 

Every day I’ve walked straight to my classroom, without looking around. I’ve consistently been at least five minutes late. 

When I walk through the hallway. Like time is catching up with me. 

On the very last door: Walter’s name. There’s a man standing inside. 

The air: it does not move. 

Later that day I’ll be in my apartment in Ottakring. I’ll be typing up the notes from my interview with Hermann Nitsch, the performance artist who revolutionized the 1960s art world with his collective Wiener Aktionisten. I’ve gone out to his country manor where he answered my questions without making a joke of them, the way he normally does. What this is: a book coming together. Do I realize that? 

My computer flickers, and my dinner from Anker—pasta, peas, cold schnitzel—sits untouched. 
I email my friends: “I’ve seen Walter! What should I do?” 
The replies are immediate: 
“What the fuck!” 
“Stay away!” 
“Don’t you have stuff you need to do? Don’t lose focus!” 
“Lovey, what exactly are you doing?” 
“Take care of yourself for once!” 
“When are you coming home?” 

“Why don’t you approach him and say hi? You could grab a coffee,” my husband says over FaceTime. My daughter is shouting in the background about what stuffed animals she wants me to bring her: either cats or rabbits.

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LAUDONGASSE, II 

I’m lying close to you, I can hear your breathing. 

In another part of the world a funeral is taking place. 
I’m supposed to be there right now. 

Instead I’m lying next to you, watching the light come in. You don’t have blinds, just a big black sheet hung before the window. 
The light seeps in freely through the openings. 

When the bells begin to sound in Votivkirche, I feel like the sound is for me, that this is when it begins. 
That I’ve missed far too much, that it’s like I’ve been stuck. 

They don’t stop ringing, those bells. 

Becoming who I am—so strong, that desire

About the author

About the author

Kira Josefsson is a writer, editor, and literary translator working between English and Swedish. She was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her work on Pooneh Rohi’s Araben (The Arab). Other work has appeared in places like Granta, Words Without Borders, The Nation, Triple Canopy, Svenska Dagbladet, and Arbetaren. She serves as Assistant Translations Editor for Anomaly, and on the editorial board for Glänta, a Swedish independent journal of arts and philosophy.

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