Your room to me alone

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Your room for me alone is a story by Vorarlberg author Michael Köhlmeier from 1997.

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The first-person narrator tells of a young man who is completely stranger to him and who has arranged to meet him at Café Eiles in Vienna precisely because of this story . He keeps throwing in comments that irritate the young man. Ultimately, he doesn't finish his experience report either.

It is winter, freezing cold and the young man is cooped up in a completely overheated car between many other people. He is abroad, in a country whose language he hardly speaks. He is glad that he took off his coat before entering the train. He is now lying over his suitcase, which is between his legs. A child is thirsty and asked around if someone has water. When the train suddenly stops, the narrator wants to help, spurred on by the “joker”, his alter ego , who repeatedly gives him instructions for his actions, and wants to get water at a gas station that can be seen through the train window in the dark . He is hoisted over the heads of the passengers, into the cold. It occurs to him that he has all his money (including papers, passport, etc.) in his coat, which is on the train. A passenger throws him money outside, which the wind blows away first, so that he first has to catch the banknote in his shirt-sleeve. He gets three bottles of mineral water - but not fast enough, the train continues without him. Now he's in no man's land, has no idea where he is, and apart from the gas station, there's no building to be seen anywhere.
Finally, having got rid of one of the three bottles, he finds a half-finished apartment block and escapes from the icy cold in January to the attic. Shaken by the cold and fever, he spends the night there. Before that, he made a kind of cave out of the Styrofoam sheets lying around, so that he is not only protected from the cold, but also from any unwelcome visitors.

The next morning he sees a young woman with blonde hair, a "gold helmet" as he calls it. She reminds him of his childhood sweetheart and, although he can only see her briefly "from the top left", he falls in love with her immediately. While she carries the rubbish down the stairs, she leaves her apartment door open for a moment and he slips inside. When she comes back she just gets ready for work and accidentally locks him up, which doesn't bother him at all. He finds the matching spare key on a key rack, which he takes. In the days that followed, he kept going into her apartment, where he spent his days - for him it became heaven on earth.
Basically he's in a hopeless position, he feels. When one day he picks up the phone to call his family so that they can rush to his aid, he fails to do so, especially since he doesn't even know where he is.
Marianne, that's the name of the young woman, works as a saleswoman during the day, as he finds out one day when he takes money out of a drawer and converts this 200 shillings into cake and tea and the like in town. He also sees the young woman working in a clothing store.

At first unintentionally, more and more intentionally, it leaves traces. Strangely enough, this does not seem to bother or disturb the young woman. According to his story, she even seemed to have liked it. Communication between the two of them is established by means of small gestures, e.g. B. that he scrubs her bathroom for four hours.
One day he is surprised by the early return of the young woman; she is not alone, but in the company of a man. As far as he can speak the language, he understands from the words that this appears to be her former lover, a married man. From the kind of conversation between the two, he realizes that he - the invisible phantom - is the cause of their reluctance. She apparently wants to break up with her lover because she has been loving someone else for a week. The young man who fled under the bed when she returned home refers this to himself, especially since she always came home at the same time and always alone.

The listener and reader must finally learn that the "joker" is still hidden under Marianne's bed and only this one. The young man, whose name is never mentioned - the author claims to have forgotten it and that, although he had asked again about the strange name - pretends to have to make a phone call and simply disappears.

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literature

  • Karoline Strauss: "Room Service". A statement on Virginia Woolf's “A room to yourself” and Michael Köhlmeier's “Your room to myself” . In: Friedbert Aspetsberger, Werner Wintersteiner (Hrsg.): Spaces of contemporary literature. Dichterstube, exhibition hall, classroom (series of publications by the Institute for Austrian Studies; Vol. 9). Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck 1999, ISBN 3-7065-1364-1 , pp. 25-31.
  • Svjetlan L. Vidulić: Loving in the androgynous world. Michael Köhlmeier's story "Your room for me alone" . In: Tihomir Engler (Ed.): Textual Understanding. Searching for traces in literary texts . Schneider-Verlag Hohengehren, Baltmannsweiler 2006, ISBN 978-3-8340-0096-5 , pp. 79-89.