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Politics

Amok Mama: That German friend you speak English to

Jacinta Nandi doesn't mind it when Germans speak to her in English. But she is never gonna have sex with another Blog-Fan as long as she lives. Promise.

Jens is one of my German friends who will only speak to me in English. A few years ago, none of these cunts were pulling this sick shit on me, now I have at least six good German friends who will only communicate with me in my mother tongue. If their English is good enough, I don’t even mind that much anymore – not as much as I used to, to be honest. It means you can use better metaphors, doesn’t it? The downsides are you don’t learn any new German idioms and also they always use the words ‘actually’ and ‘fucking’ in a slightly wrong place in the sentence. It’s never totally wrong, but always slightly wrong. And this slight wrongness slowly seeps into your own language use like as if through osmosis, until terrible, terrible things start happening like people on Twitter and Facebook actually thinking you’re a non-native speaker. So you know. Actually, that’s a bit fucking annoying.

“What’s the difference between a fuck buddy and a lover?” Jens asks me. Jens read my blog from last week, recognized himself, and phoned me up to check if it was meant to be him. “No!” I shouted, as if I were totally insulted he could even have thought such a thing. “Well, I have made a joke, once or twice, about you smelling a bit,” he said. “Have you?” I drawled lazily. “I’ve never noticed. Jens is someone totally different. You’ve never met them. The real Jens. You don’t know them. They live in Heidelberg.”

The real, real Jens has popped over to borrow a book. We’re lending each other books. I’ve lent him Margaret Atwood and he’s lent me Tschick. I’m not allowed to fold the pages down, Germans hate that.

“A lover feels sorry for you for not having a husband, a fuck buddy doesn’t,” I explain.

“Are you still sleeping with your Blog-Fan?” He asks.

“Which one?” I say.

“There’s more than one?” he asks, genuinely shocked.

“Loads of people read my blog,” I say, defensively. “Even Bohni from Chaussee der Enthusiasten reads my blog. He sends me feedback via e-mail sometimes.”

“There’s more than one Blog-Fan you’ve slept with?” Jens says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think you’re talking about the Boy-Blog-Fan. I only had sex with him twice, then he didn’t want to have sex with me anymore. And sex the second time hardly counts.”

“Why didn’t he want to have sex with you anymore?”

“I didn’t ask him!” I say, outraged. “I didn’t ask him to fill out a feedback form. I’m not in the customer service department of Jacinta’s Muschi GmbH. So then I started having sex with the Girl-Blog-Fan.”

“Oh, wow,” says Jens. “Did you do scissor action?”

“We didn’t do any scissor action,” I say sadly. “She’d promised to teach me scissor action. I am actually owed one scissor action session. We had a verbal agreement. She was breaking me in gently and everything. But then you know what happened? The Boy-Blog-Fan met her one night and he set her up on a fucking beer date with his lesbian best friend and then she just, like, immediately had sex with her. Like she just stumbled into a paddling pool and had immediate proper lesbian sex with the proper lesbian while the Boy-Blog-Fan threw peanuts at them.”

Jens looks confused.

“They had lesbian sex in a paddling pool while the Boy-Blog-Fan watched?”

I sigh exasperatedly. “That was a metaphor,” I say.

“So she won’t have sex with you anymore?” Jens asks. “The Girl-Blog-Fan? She’s demoted you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve got my revenge though. She lent me a feminist book and I’ve folded down half the pages.”

Jens looks panicked. “Don’t worry,” I say sweetly. “I’d never do something like that to you. So then I was a bit pissed off with the Boy-Blog-Fan yeah? Like, he doesn’t want to have sex with me, fair enough, but he doesn’t need to deliberately sabotage my wild lesbian affair. I mean, now I will basically never do scissor action. I am going to die a person who doesn’t know what scissor action feels like. I have a right to be pissed off.”

“Of course you were pissed off, his behaviour’s outrageous. Who would do that? You don’t want to have sex with a girl anymore, and then she has a rebound fling with a lesbian and you throw a fucking spanner in the works.”

“Well, it wasn’t really a rebound fling. There was some overlap, you know. And she was away for a bit. Anyway, she wasn’t the kind of girl you’d have a rebound fling with, she was very still and measured, you know? She did things in this very still, measured way. Like a nun. I felt kind of honoured that someone so still would want to fuck me. Anyways, now I’ve kündigt the friendship.”

“You’ve cancelled the friendship?”

I shoot Jens an icy stare. I hate it when they do that, these German friends who speak to you in English. Does he really think I’ve forgotten that the English word for kündigen is cancel? This is why I hate speaking to these people in English, because they are kind of stupid sometimes.

“I haven’t cancelled my friendship,” I say icily. “Because that isn’t a thing people do in English. I have, however, kündigt the friendship. Hers and his. She was quite upset, but he said he didn’t give a shit, he said he had friends he liked a lot more than me in Kiev and he didn’t know if they were dead or not.”

“Well, I hope his friends in Kiev are still alive but he does fucking sound like a bit of a dick to be honest,” says Jens.

“Yeah, totally,” I say, but then a wave of misery swims over my body. It’s so awful to think that a person with such good taste in blogs could be a total dick.

“I think you need to stop sleeping with your Blog-Fans, Jacinta,” says Jens.

“Oh, I know that,” I say. “Plus, I am going to brick my heart up and fill it with concrete and never let anyone touch it again. I’m going to walk about with a sodden lump of soggy cement where my heart should go. People will try and touch me, but I won’t even feel them, I’m going to walk through life empty and dead like Nicole Kidman out of The Others. I am unloved and unloveable and it will always be this way. They’ve taught me that,” I say, and start crying, a small, gentle cry, with a touch of tender bitterness, “my blog fans.”

One of the things I really like about Jens is that he doesn’t mind me crying. A lot of German men get really angry if you cry and start drawing up life charts and stuff with aims or else they try marching you down to the Soziale-Psychiatrische-Dienst to get you formally sectioned. Jens just totally ignores me.

“Well, you never know,” he says, “there may be lesbian prostitutes who you could actually pay money so they’d do crazy wild lesbian scissor action sex on you.”

I wipe the snot off of my chin. “You’re just saying that,” I say. I look out the window. It is kind of almost dark outside. It’s definitely not day-time-daylight anymore. “Jens,” I say. “Is it too early to have a glass of wine?”

“A little bit,” he says. “But we could actually make an exception for once.”

Catch her live: Jacinta Nandi aka Amok-Mama is reading with the Surfpoeten at Mauersegler 9pm on Wednesday, with Rakete 2000 in Ä at 9pm on Thursday and at the Lokalrunde in Kaffee Burger at 9 pm on Friday.