Christiane Fichtner, Biography 008

Biography 008

Christiane Fichtner - Biography

At night, we often sat on the dark staircase in her parents' house. I Shot the Sheriff and the sounds of scratched vinyl lingering in the air. The village outside was all ears. She was from that village, and she suffered because of it. And because she suffered, I suffered too. I listened to her stories. I didn't' ask if they were true. And I didn't ask myself either. I drank her words like I drank the Campari we always had: With no orange juice and no ice. We couldn't take our eyes off each other, couldn't keep our hands from touching. She never talked about wanting to become an artist. It was the guilt that weighed heavy on her shoulders that wouldn't let her go. The guilt she felt for not saving her mother when she had one of her asthma attacks; her last. (She stood there watching, and then she looked at her sister instead of calling an ambulance immediately.) Her mother died at 46. After that, she dropped out of school. Although she was good in school, when she wanted to be. It was her choice. "La taciturne," her teacher called her, "The silent one."

Born in 1974, in the age of open minds, you would think. But that village was like running the gauntlet for her. Her father, a law-abiding craftsman who worked at the university, was ashamed of her. What kind of daughter was she to be always running around in black flowing dresses? Didn't she come from an honorable family? - Her kingdom was under the roof; her father lived on the main floor. With her mother it had been different: She could talk to her about everything. She had wanted to study but couldn't. And now she was gone.

She withdrew from the world. Something absolute grew inside of her while the village outside was waiting for a sign: A sign of disobedience, a sign telling them that they were right with their prejudices. When she was invited to classmates' birthday parties in the village, she went. But she was always different, the weird one. (I was there too. I thought she was crazy then.) At some point or another she fell in love with Jamaica. She started smoking ganja, doing Rasta chants, traveling to Kingston. Many guys were interested in her, but she dumped them when she was done with them. Her apartment was filled with clouds of weed, joints, and incense sticks. She was obsessed with medicinal herbs. She studied biogeography. She started staying in Jamaica for longer periods. She lost contact with people from home. She felt like she had been betrayed by many. "It's all so ridiculous," she said once with bitterness when she was feeling completely dejected. It made her mouth even smaller. I always said she was right. Her small company (today you would call it a start-up) that she launched together with a friend went belly up: Writing reports for landscaping, field research, rubber boots, a botanist's vasculum, a laptop. That she used such a thing! But there was nothing on its hard drive that said anything about how she once escaped from her home village and ended up in one that was even worse. Looking for peace and quiet, to write a book! Seriously, in that village they thought she was a miracle healer, an angel. When she arrived, it was like a saint had appeared. They took her to see the sick and disabled. 'Please, do something!' they said. But she didn't know what they wanted from her. And when the disabled couldn't walk again and the blind couldn't see, the winds changed in her disfavor. An outsider in the village warned her of the danger in a whisper: "If you don't leave now, they'll get you." He showed her a secret place where the people had built a kind of altar for the stranger they had never given a chance to say who she really was. Shocked, she ran away. And in fact, a little later, the altar, which had turned into a stake, no longer intended for an angel but for a witch, went up in flames. At least that's what she thought. She said. (And I believed it.) And also, the other thing wasn't on the hard drive, but was whispered in the wind (and absorbed by me), a few yards above the ground, on the raised hide where we had climbed after our walk, away from the village: That she had studied art, before she had studied biogeography. When I visited her in her room under the roof (4, rue de l'Armorique, Paris 15e) - which was in a hostel for service personnel -, where she alternated between making instant soups or Nescafé on the gas cooker, I didn't know anything about her excursion to the Académie des Beaux Arts. It wasn't until later, when I, sentimental and curious, visited the famous art academy in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, that I realized right away why she had dropped out: It was too academic, the whole thing. Or maybe they just tossed her out? Sitting in the raised hide, she told me how she, feverish and shaking, had handed in her portfolio for the admissions test. Paris was hard to be alone in. But that was how she wanted it - because art can only be created at the price of being alone. You could read it in her eyes. (Or was it really there?)

Sooner or later "the road we shared went off in separate ways", as she liked to say. I have not been able to find out what has happened to her since. All that I know is: She went to Jamaica one more time to find a man to be the father of her child. She thought Caribbean genes would be best. Is she a single parent now, who regrets not having become an artist and who still lives in her small village? Has she emigrated to Jamaica and runs a backpacker hostel surrounded by palm trees? But wait, she wouldn't even need to run a hostel. She inherited a large sum of money together with her sister. From an uncle she had never met, but who obviously had remembered her before he died, although everyone in the family had forgotten him. Just like her father forgot her. Perhaps she's just leading an average life, living off the interest of the inheritance. She's 31 years old now. Most of life is pragmatic. I'm sure even she has figured that out by now.

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