Small Acts of Disappearance (4 page)

She had been to Friday drinks a few weeks into her new position, and after a few hours, a few beverages, one of her female colleagues had approached her at the bar. ‘I'm onto you,' the colleague had said. ‘You're a sister.'

‘Sorry?' she stammered, ‘A sister?'

‘Were you AN or BN?' she asked.

She denied that she knew what her colleague meant, but was holding her wine glass before her, in that hand with the thick callouses raised above her knuckles – these are called Russell's Sign, after the doctor who first identified bulimia nervosa, BN, as a condition in its own right. The colleague laid her own knobbled fingers against them, and repeated:

‘You're a sister.'

It's a strange family to have found and to hold to, but even more powerful to know, at last, that I can't any longer stand clear.

IN BERLIN

 

 

 

 

 

I
felt smaller in Berlin than I ever had before: the Northern Germans are, by and large, a big-boned people, the shanks of their legs are particularly impressive. My language teacher had taken to calling me ‘Fee-ona', from the German word for fairy, or sprite; I couldn't reach any of the pots in the kitchen of my billet. And I was nervous, as I always am at train stations, that evening, faced with the mechanised movement of so many people, so many ways to get swept up and out and along. The station was crawling with football fans headed to a screening of a European Championship match somewhere near the Brandenburg Gate, I was lost and I was late, and I knew, as it were, that the German trains would run on time.

I was wending my way west, I sat against a tinted window, the sinking of the sun slow and languorous as it is in the height of summer at those latitudes. It was dusk
for almost all of my four-hour journey, only the last few towns were finally sinking into the dark. As I travelled, the window reflected, just off-centre, a glowing orange sun and the landscape passing on the other side of the train. But the reflection blurred slightly, fuzzed around the edges, the long sun tinted the whole scene the strange sepia-orange of old polaroids. It was as if I was looking, suddenly, at the present landscape through some strange, shadowy resemblance of the past, as if I were filtering everything I saw through a photo album long gone grainy and crackled. Berlin is a nostalgic city, its past still present, somehow, in its mismatched buildings and large-scale public monuments scattered across its suburbs, in pockets of people still talking about what it was like in the broken-down, bohemian years just after reunification. I never could tell if the city, at least, had found a way to come to terms with its own past, or this remembering.

I was travelling west after a month of intense language classes, and an even more intense schedule of visits to museums and to makeshift bars with ex-pat poets, who continued to delight in the ridiculously low prices and large shots of hard spirits in Berlin, and taking a break from the writers' fellowship that had brought me to that city, to revisit Münster. Münster claims fame as the bicycle capital of Germany, and as the site of the gothic
Lambertikirche
cathedral, its clock face supporting three huge, blackened cages. These cages once held the corpses of the town's most famous rebels, who had promoted propertylessness and polygamy, and had controlled the city for eleven months,
sometime in the sixteenth century. I hadn't been to Münster for more than ten years, since a winter-long student exchange in high school. My host family, in the first days of my visit, had borrowed a neighbour's child's bike, a
Lottorad,
for me. As I rode into school each day, at least one person would say
Oh, I had one of those when I was small.
I had been well then.

My host parents, Hannelore and Christian, picked me up from the train with their dog, a sleek, aloof and lanky thing, with a chest that swept magnificently upwards. In the front hallway, the very same deer-skulls still hung on the walls, the date they were hunted down written in black ink across their foreheads. The same Warhol print in the living room. The same tablecloth was in the kitchen, I'd remembered its pattern of culinary herbs and their cursive names, which had soaked into me a marvellous vocabulary:
Basilikum, Thymian, Rosmarin, Salbei.
In my attic bedroom with the sloping roof, the one I'd slept in all those years ago, a bunch of pale pink snapdragons, called
Löwenmau
in German, lions' maws, were resting on the bedside table. The relief I felt was physical, a sudden heaviness of limb, an abandoning of the constant guardedness that Berlin had pressed upon me. I remembered waking early in this room and watching nuns cycle past the house on thin-framed bikes, trying to catch the first snow of the season in my hands from the small window. On the green writing desk was a ceramic dish filled with foil-wrapped marzipan. ‘You must still love marzipan!' Hannelore said.

In Berlin, I couldn't help but realise, very early on, that so much of what we know medically about hunger comes, however indirectly, from this land. That the two most notorious – and most thorough – studies of hunger came about because of the Second World War. The first of these is easier to talk about, because it happened in a Minnesota university, with volunteers, in preparation for an eventuality that no one really knew the scale of yet, an academic hunger. It was 1944, and ethics boards were yet to be imagined into being.

The Minnesota Experiment recruited a group of healthy young men, mostly conscientious objectors, who had passed a rigorous series of physical and psychological tests to prove that they were specimens in their prime. These men were deliberately deprived of food over a period of nine months, and the changes in their weight, behaviour, physical functioning observed at a minute level, before a period of controlled re-feeding later on. The researchers were creating, in a scientific way, a microcosm of what whole populations were experiencing in Europe, trying to model what rehabilitation might need to look like once the war was won. At this stage, the scientists were thinking only of the civilian damage of war – the famine caused by destruction of farmland, loss of manpower, disruption of infrastructure. No one could imagine yet the scale of what was happening in the camps.

The men ate boiled potatoes, swedes, macaroni, bread, the kinds of foods that Europe's population was relying so
heavily on. They were given small doses, occasionally and unpredictably, of sugar, butter or meat. They were expected to walk twenty-two miles each day, and to lose twenty-five per cent of their body weight in the first twelve weeks. One of the diagnostic definitions of anorexia, in comparison, is a ten per cent bodyweight loss. The lead investigator, Ancel Keys, became well known in the 1960s for his books on ‘The Mediterranean Diet', advocating olive oil, antipasto and red wine. He also invented the Body Mass Index, the measure of relative height and weight that's still used to determine, however bluntly, any person's healthy weight.

Keys' subjects, these perfectly healthy young men, soon exhibited much of the behaviour that I had only ever seen, before I read about his experiment, written up as the symptomology of any eating disorder. The lists of things to watch for in your daughter, the tell-tale signs I'd been so steadfastly ignoring in myself. The men grew rigid and controlling around meal times and developed intricate rituals, eating slowly, guarding their plates, asking for extra salt and extra spices. (My use of garlic had become infamous within my family, my dishes inedible to everyone else.) They chewed each mouthful many times, cut their potatoes into miniscule, even proportions, sat at the same place, at the same table, every time.

Some men drank up to fifteen cups of coffee in one day, others chewed gum endlessly, they chewed their hair and nails. They collected cookbooks, and takeaway menus, became irritable, snappy, squabbly. They were possessive. One
man was caught riffling through the laboratory's garbage, eating food scraps straight from the bin. Most bought and hoarded food – not to eat, just to own – and kept it in the wardrobes of their rooms. And every single one of the thirty-six volunteers eventually stole from the grocer in the town where they were staying.

I had been stealing food, by the time I read about the Minnesota Experiment, for over two years, mostly from the oversized, overstocked Coles on the first floor of the Broadway Centre, near my home. It wasn't a matter of need, I could afford the items I was dropping in to the bottom of my bag – cheeses, sauces, the occasional tray of meat. I rarely ate them. I know I felt, at times, resentful at the idea of paying for food that I'd go to great lengths to avoid, that I only needed to feed to friends at dinner parties, or to give my pantry shelves some appearance of normality. I know too that it was only the items that I didn't consider part of my accepted repertoire of foods that I wouldn't pay for – but it's still not something that I really understand. I'd said this out loud, inside the hospital, and there was only silence.

And then the other women started talking. One of them had stolen ice-cream, chocolates, in the large quantities she was embarrassed to run past the check-out staff. One had been unable to pay for her binges, another for the asparagus and brussels sprouts that she'd been buying out-of-season. Two had been caught by store detectives, one was forced to go to court.

None of us had ever spoken of our thefts before. But part of each of us had become rodent-like, gathering and
squirrelling away the things we needed to survive, hoarding outside ourselves the things we kept in such dire shortage inside our bodies.

The men in the Minnesota Experiment grew apathetic, inattentive, sad. They gave up on their studies, on their relationships, because they just couldn't be bothered any more. Their dreams, when they occurred, were about food. I only recently realised that most people don't eat in their dreams.

The physical effects of starvation syndrome are much more familiar, more obvious. The body grows thin, the organs – especially the heart and stomach – slow, and shrink. Bones hollow, muscles waste as the body begins to feed off itself. The skin grows dull, flaky and grey, it breaks easily, and repairs itself with difficulty. It bruises. Hands and feet grow cold, hair and nails became brittle. Hormone production shuts down entirely. Keys described the process as a strange kind of accelerated ageing, a trimming back, the body's economising on anything that isn't essential to survival. The men fell more often, grew clumsier. But their senses stayed alert, and their mental acuity did too. Starvation is a state of constant sensual anxiety, even as the body powers down.

This is the metaphor: in the hospital, we were told that our bodies were like cars, we have to fill them up with petrol or they stop running. I said I was trying out solar power, and was sent from the room like a naughty child.

The Minnesota Experiment was less successful around the question of rehabilitation – it wasn't until the sweeping crises across Africa in the 1980s and 90s that scientists finally got a handle on the delicate processes of refeeding the starving body without causing it to shut down completely in shock. The experiment had been designed to include two phases of refeeding: in the first six weeks, a controlled and gradual stepping up, where different groups of men were given different supplements, different amounts of calories, but essentially the same meals, potatoes, swedes, butterless bread. This was to be followed by a ‘free' phase, where the men were allowed to eat whatever they desired. But the men rebelled in the controlled phase, angry and impatient, and began eating outside of the program. They'd grown stubborn and rigid and controlling, tuned inwards, into themselves.

But as the men slowly became better fed, almost all of their symptoms reversed. With nutrition, the body healed itself, with energy, the brain returned to full functionality. But behaviourally, psychologically, there were traces that remained, tactics learnt that just wouldn't go away. All of the men ended the project weighing more than they had at the beginning, eating more, and more quickly, lest the food be taken from them again. Many of them battled with obesity for the rest of their lives, others claimed to have never lost their distrustfulness. Three of them left their studies to become chefs. I've met many former eating-disorder patients who've become psychiatric nurses; others, in the throes of their illnesses, working in restaurants or cafés.

The body never forgets starvation. I think of my grandfather, still keeping old, but repairable watches, promotional DVDs from Sunday newspapers, recycled pieces of string inside his cupboards, having come of age in the Depression.

More and more I think that the body never forgets places, the spaces it has moved through. I walked through the empty bedrooms on the top floor of that house in Münster, where my host sisters, now studying in larger towns across the country, had grown up. I remembered laughing with Marieke over her English homework (‘I think Simon
fancies
you!'), playing card games on the rolled-rag carpet, lighting candles with Daniele and strategising about her painful crush on her hockey coach, Micha. The cold tiles beneath my feet. I remembered Daniele convincing me that the pale gratings on my soft-serve icecream, which the Germans call
Spaghetti-Eis,
were parmesan cheese, ordering a pizza with
Erbsen
because I didn't know the word translated as green peas, how I started mimicking the way Daniele would stab her teaspoon through the peeled-back paper lid of her emptied yoghurt.

Downstairs the next morning, Hannelore and Christian were sitting at opposite ends of their dark-wood table, the still points in a scattershot of newspapers, pots of marmalade and jam and plates of bread, a silver coffee service, squat peaches and crumbled eggshells. Hannelore leapt to her feet
and hugged me.
‘Fichen,'
she said, using the diminutive, ‘we take sweet breakfast here, but I remember you like cheese!' She bounded to the cellar for another platter, more butter, they'd chosen regional specialties and a smoky raclette, which I didn't remember having tried before until I bit into the wedge thrust on my plate. The body remembers.