E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
Parry Orpheus Builds a Girl
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-797-3
Verlag: ONE
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-797-3
Verlag: ONE
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
HEATHER PARRY is a Glasgow-based writer and editor, originally from South Yorkshire. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She is also the author of a short story collection, This Is My Body, Given For You, and the non-fiction book, Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism. Heather lives in Glasgow with her partner and their cats, Ernesto and Fidel.
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1. Wilhelm
I was born in Dresden in nineteen nineteen. The end of conflict is an aphrodisiac like no other, and to it I owe my existence. My father was twenty-four at the time of my birth, my mother eighteen. They were married quickly upon confirmation of my mother’s condition, but their relationship lasted barely longer than my gestation. Finding the responsibility of a young family at odds with his natural virility and longing for experience, my father left my mother when I was only a few months old, and my mother returned to the familial home. Her own father had died in the war, but her mother, my grandmother, remained. It was in this house that I was raised.
As my mother was but a child herself, my grandmother took on the responsibility of raising the young boy in her home. The house in Striesen was of two floors, and my mother was generously given the bottom level, with a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom of her own. My grandmother and I resided on the top floor, where we had our own living quarters; everything that my mother had below, but with a study, a playroom and a balcony in addition. The washing facilities were on the ground floor, and, in exchange for our room and board in the home, my mother was given the task of taking on this part of the household upkeep.
Now, perhaps, is a good time to give an overview of my grandmother’s character and personality. She was fifty one when I was born; a practical woman, she had waited until her early thirties to marry, and she considered my mother a frivolous fool for bringing a son into the world when she had neither the means nor the maturity to raise him well. She felt it her duty to pour her energies into my development, to account for what she saw as my mother’s maternal deficiencies. I can only say that I loved Oma completely and without restraint. I slept in a cot by her bed until I outgrew it, then I slept in her bed itself until I reached puberty. The playroom was, at that point, converted into a room of my own. Yet there were many nights on which I stole through to my grandmother’s bed, once she had fallen asleep, and tucked myself into the covers alongside her, comforted by her light snoring and the smell of her hair wrap, which she rarely washed. There is an air about the elderly, a sensory fullness of the rooms in which they reside, and to a child this is an embrace. On restless nights I would watch her sleep, thinking of the years scored into her face, the experiences that she’d had; that I might have. In the mornings she would go through the charade of chastising me, but never without a smile; she slept more soundly with me at her side. Oma was a tiny individual, previously strong, then withering and thinning, very aware of the ways of the world and the darkness and light within it, but she was also a sickly woman, bedridden for much of my life and often confined to her own rooms with the stench of illness around her. When she reached her sixties, an unkind eye might have guessed that she was twenty years older. She was frail in body but in mind she was resolute; she was a learned woman and possessed a singular dedication to knowledge. Despite not being physically well travelled, she had a broad and all-encompassing interest in the beliefs of other cultures, and practised what I now recognise as a somewhat bastardised form of Zen Buddhism, where she engaged in focused breathing and hours-long meditation, lying perfectly still and ruminating on the things she felt and knew. I should make it clear here that she did not find the Asian cultures particularly insightful; she merely enjoyed the way the practice made her feel, and taught me the same, pressing her warm palm to my sternum and teaching me to control what entered my body. She did not believe in the frivolity of an excess of food, having lived through trauma and hardship and being cognisant of the needs of others, and in her later years she preferred to survive on nuts and berries, things that I could collect for her on my daily walks, or that could be bought cheaply, with no need for preparation. Oma always said she had better things to do than cook.
Through my childhood and into my teenage years, Oma read to me daily—European classics mixing with the medical textbooks that my grandfather, a physician himself, had left behind. In this way, I was predominantly home-schooled. I did not often mix with children my own age, apart from the rare occasion where my mother, home from long hours at her factory employment, could wrench me from my grandmother’s grasp and put me out to play, or into a club, or at a meeting for young boys. I never took to sports, and my physical activity was focused on inspiring growth. It could be posited that my early exposure to my grandmother’s infirmity served as a vaccination against sickness, as I rarely fell ill, and when I did so, recovered quickly. My mother claimed that this was due to my father’s robust military constitution, but this is nothing more than supposition. My studies, conversely, consumed me. From a young age I was allowed to remain in the room when the doctor visited Oma (despite the doctor’s initial reticence) and as I grew more dextrous and capable, I was taught how to administer her medications, how to move her body to avoid bedsores, how to examine her to check that her pulse was strong, her blood pressure manageable and her temperature consistent. My grandmother did not enjoy being hauled about by the doctor. Her thin frame was light enough for me to handle, and I was more careful with her, seeing her as more than a bag of bones. In my arms she was free from the shame of growing decrepit; she was teaching me, I would remind her, and I could have no better patient to learn on. In my free hours, I threw myself into the romantic and gothic classics. Goethe, Schiller, von Kleist, Novalis; from these I gained my understanding of matters of the heart as well as matters of the flesh, and as I grew older, I read these to my increasingly ailing Oma, watching her blossom once again in the realm of love.
It must have been a strange tableau: a young boy and his grandmother in the same bed, sharing joy in the dark romantic classics; and indeed we shared a deep and powerful relationship. Affection blinds one to the other’s faults and to me, Oma was perfect—stoic, capable, wise. I had my father’s looks (I deduced as much from a photograph found in my mother’s purse) and my grandmother’s muscular intelligence; with my mother, I had little that I could find in common.
Of course, part of this lack of connection was a combination of natural childhood rebelliousness and sheer immature egoism. My mother was a harried woman, unprepared for parenthood and forced to work long hours. Oma, on the other hand, had nothing but me to give her attentions to, and she taught me that the world was mine; that I was destined for eminence, that great things were owed to me. She instilled in me a pride in my mind and my heritage, cemented in me a love for the great European cities of old. Her love for Dresden was as infectious as any disease. As she grew unable to take me out to the city herself (which, she said, was a blessing, for she could not bear the presence of the Poles who had begun to plague the city on their way to seek work), I was sent away for afternoons to sketch the sites she used to love, coming back to report which type of people lingered around the Frauenkirche, which performers were coming to the Semperoper, whether foreigners gathered in numbers that should cause concern. I was never a natural artist but worked hard to develop some skill in still life drawing, and with pride I can say that this skill remains in some form to this day. Oma covered the walls of our room in my artworks and said that I was her eyes. I was her everything.
It was on one of my artistic excursions into the old city that an accident befell me. I was thirteen years of age and had spent the morning drawing scenes in my sketchbook, using charcoal to show shadow, pencil to show lines. I was building an entire skyline of the city and was making some progress when I grew hungry and headed for home. Strolling across the road with my papers under my arm and pencils in hand, I was hit by a wagon driven by a young woman. I was not a large boy, and the impact threw me across the street where my head hit the pavement, knocking me unconscious. I woke up five days later in hospital, with my mother at my bedside, playing the dutiful parent. My distress at not seeing Oma was great, but my doctors stated that only my mother should be allowed to visit me in my condition—and Oma, without assistance to leave the home, was effectively confined to her bed. As I awoke, the nurses and doctors came to my aid, and the doctors proceeded to tell me what had happened—and were stunned when I interrupted them in the middle of their explanation, able to tell them exactly when I had arrived at the hospital, how long I had been there, and who had visited me. Trapped in my brief coma, I had nonetheless been fully aware of the things around me; the movements of soft bodies around the room, the sharp introduction of medical equipment into my person. I recognised the doctor who had taken the most time with me and was able to say hello and express my gratitude while the colour rapidly drained from his face. Conversation then turned to my confusion, and all present agreed that I was playing some sort of trick on them, until I, in a proud voice, told the doctor that he had been humming Strauss’s Radetzky March while he treated me—one of my grandmother’s favourites, in fact.
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