The Siren's Call

October 2018. Crossing the border

Strasbourg is, in contrary to Nordic opinion, not in Germany. The city is located on the French side of the river Rhine which flows from Switzerland northwards to the Netherlands, marking the border between Germany and France. The border is open. Cars and trains cross the river on the large bridges, and even the Strasbourg tram crosses the bridge to the small town on the German side. The white German car number plates mix with the yellow French ones. Germans hop over to clutter the Christmas market in Strasbourg. French hop over in the other direction to buy cigarettes and enjoy all the fun things which make life enjoyable, but are not allowed in France, like gambling, prostitution and high ways without speed limit.

Nevertheless... growing up on the German side, I never really got aware that I was living 30 km away from the border to a country with 50 mio habitants. The language barrier between the two very different languages is hard to overcome, and a majority of people on both sides don't really see why they should step out of their comfort zone just to talk to each other. Germany is well known for high quality synchronizing of movies, soaps and pc games, so for sceptic natives, there is not much need for foreign language skills. The French attitude to foreign languages... let's not talk about it. Thus, it was good enough for my family to know that they are crazy drivers, charge money for using their roads and have confusing road signs - for merely the sake of being different, of course.

With age 28 I caught a severe case of handpan fever. Which was a damn good thing to happen. It was not really possible yet to buy them online. If you wanted to have an instrument, you needed to reach out to a maker and hope that there was not a one-year waiting list. Thanks to Youtube I got aware of a maker's place on the French side. On the height of my social phobia, I didn't really see myself finding the courage to go to the place with the strange road signs and weird radio channels, but they had a beautiful video of an instrument with a scale called "La Sirena", and I felt that this was the one which I really wanted to have. So I got myself to at least make an attempt, probably it was sold already and nothing would come out of it anyway.

°Paper crumble°

Cat, is that you?

You got an answer.

Let me read it!

It says that the instrument which you want is not for sale. But you may come to visit to test it, and have a new one made just for you.

I... don't believe it until I read it.

Ah, and by the way… looks like it is him.

...who?

The guy from the video. With the long dark hair, timid gesture, French accent, talking about crafting. You don't remember?

I... do.

Of course. I thought you were thinking that this is a very beautiful man.

Shut up.

... which is not a thought you have often.

Shut up!

Seems that it's him who made the instrument that you want. And who just invited you.

Speechless, I looked at the cat.

Now you have no choice, hmh?

I nodded, slowly.

I tried to find a solution allowing to take the train there and back on the same day. When I got the next email, I thought I misunderstood something. He offered me to join him on a concert at the evening, and to accomodate me for the night. I looked up the translation for the long word.

Isn't that amazing!?

Too bad that you need to refuse...

Hello Devil... I already wondered where you are. You're right. I can't do it.

Refuse, you mean?

Accept.

But still you're watching the video he sent you, of the artist who will play the concert.

Yes...

Why do you think that you can't do it?

I was both impatient for the day to come, and dreadfully afraid. At this time in my life, there was hardly any occasion to leave home apart from a biweekly therapist appointment. It was painfully difficult to go out on an adventure and to not know what was expecting me. I never had used my poor school English and was worried about not being able to focus in an environment I did not know, about not knowing what to say.

It was a 2 hour train ride from Stuttgart (resisting to call it home, it rather felt like a place where I meanwhile happened to have my address, and bed, for some reason). The route crosses the German area of my adolescence. The familiar line of the Black Forest hills in the East and the villages in the plains around the river Rhine make me feel a dull anti-nostalgia - soothed with gratefulness to pass by, as "just visiting", the square which seemed to say "in jail" for a long time of my life.

At the border, things started to go wrong, starting with my phone connection breaking off, the machine not accepting my payment, the screen not showing information. Lost and helpless, I stood at the station of the foreign metropolis, listening to announcements which sounded beautiful, but were void of information for me. Ageno ? Wua dö.

Hahaha, looks like the kind handsome maker will wait at the station for long. No Sophie to pick up. Too stupid to find the right train...

Oh, please not...

And you can't even let him know. Hihihihi...

Argh shit this can't be true!

I jumped up the stairs to the track and into a train which looked promising. The doors closed and the train started to move. Then I checked the ticket - class 2 it said. Not track 2. French tickets don't tell you the track. But turned out that it was the right train after all.

“Welcome to my paradise”, he said. We arrived at a remote, former train warden’s house on the fields, a bit outside of the village. Trains drove by every now and then, and I could hear the ringing of the barrier which no longer required a family aligning their life around times of passing trains.

He guided me into a small room with raw painted walls, a sofa, a table and a fireplace. Handpans in different colours were waiting in shelves along the walls to be adopted and taken to their forever home. More handpans were hanging on the walls, as well as a small collection of, for some reason, didgeridoos. Fringed blankets were covering a closet and a doorway, keeping the warmth in.

There it was. The instrument I had found online. With care, I took it onto my lap. I hardly knew how or what to play, or what to listen for. I was full of sorrows about acting strange, stealing his time, not being able to make use of the occasion.

At the late afternoon, we left for the concert in Strasbourg. He was planning to have a small stand at the place, presenting his instruments. I watched the tall, joking and slightly odd fellow walking back and forth with bouncy steps, carrying his instruments into the venue. He had tied his long, dark mane together in a loose knot at the back of his head, so it fell down over his back and shoulder. On his head, a few light strands formed a pattern of rays. How colourful might daily life be, evolving around crafting instruments in Strasbourg?

We spent a few busy hours in the middle of people swarming to the stand to play the instruments. When the crowd scattered at last, he gave me a hug.

"Thank you for coming. It helps to have some more eyes when there's so much happening."

We drove through the cold night of October, back to the remote house. A carpet of fog was covering the fields. It was getting late. I could hear the echoes of voices of my friends and family, repeating the ever same chant about a girl staying with a stranger. The same voices that had told me that I could not do this. They were engraved in my mind. They had told me lots of things that I should not do. So the princess had learned to stay in her tower. She was afraid to even go to the bakery.

I was tired of being that person. To watch the seasons pass from the window. I was not that little girl anymore. I had taken the reasonable precaution to not let anyone know. It was a good feeling.

"Vegan, you say?" he asked.

"Yes. Since three weeks."

"No problem."

He started cutting some fresh vegetables, and fried them up with tofu.

After the meal he took the large, brass-golden disc of metal and hung it into the doorway to the handpan room. Then he switched off the lights and directed me to have a seat.

"Is this the alarm?", I fooled, pointing at the disc. "When someone enters the house in the dark, they will just run straight into this and everyone will be awake?"

"Haha, yes, but it works for me, too. Do you know these?"

He showed me two wind chimes.

"Close your eyes", he said.

I did.

I sensed him stepping in front of me. Then he started to rotate them around my head. They had a soft, bright and clear sound.

I felt a warm fuzziness rising inside of me.

What‘s happening…?

You‘re being enchanted. Nothing to worry about. Just keep your eyes closed and enjoy.

Ah. Fine.

Then he played the gong. He moved the mallet over the serrated surface of the disc, producing a strangely distant deep metallic sound which filled the room and seemed to be answered by the handpans on the shelves.

He smiled at me and offered me the mallet.

"Hold it like this", he suggested. He stepped behind me and led my hand.

The warm fuzziness came back. He was really close.

A door in the back of the room led to the narrow, creaky staircase, with a round window looking out over the train line and the fields. In the corridor, there were pictures on the walls, showing painted dots and circles in brown, orange and white. Paintings in the style of Australian Aboriginals.

He showed me the guest room and wished me good night. A salt crystal lamp in the shelf produced a dim, red light.

My ear noise warned me that I was exhausted, but my brain did not feel like sleeping. I took the handpan up with me and placed it next to me on the bed. It had only this one day with it.

You liked it, right? When he came close.

I don't know.

You do. I can feel it.

How can he know when I don't know myself? I mean, we know each other for a few hours now. We're strangers, basically.

He knows what he's doing. He reads your eyes. He would not come close if you weren't showing that you like it.

Is that a French thing to learn?

Possibly.

It took me a long time to fall asleep. I had never thought about the art of enchanting. How it seemed to evolve around moving someone out of their comfort zone and creating impressions on all senses: Sound and light, music, taste and just an idea of warmth.

"Why didn't you put an A on the instrument?", I asked clumsily. He served a selfmade almond milk smoothie for breakfast. With not more than two hours of sleep, it seemed impossible to find the English words. Sometimes I just stopped in the middle of a sentence, looking at him in helpless embarrassment.

"Would you like to get involved in making your instrument or do you want me to do all the work?", he asked.

I looked at him, surprised. I will never forget that question.

He took me for a walk in the forest close by the village. I felt wobbly on my legs. I had not planned to stay longer than one day - but I also did not want to get home. We walked through the yellow and orange autumn leaves. When we got back, he gave me another long hug. Then we sat down on the terrace.

"Ah, I‘m getting old.”

„How old are you getting?“

„Ah, this was a trap. Guess.“

He lit a cigarette. I wished he wasn't smoking.

„No. I won‘t.“

„Not playing this game?“

„Not playing this game.“

„But I guessed yours.“

„No, you didn‘t. I told you.“

He hesitated, then said: „Fourty-one. When I see my buddies I know from earlier… they all have families now, so I‘m considered alien.“

We continued talking about friends and life goals.

"I like you to be here", he said finally.

I like to be here as well.

I stayed one more day, watching him showing and explaining the process of tuning the instruments. A shell of steel - the convex top half of a handpan-to-be - was mounted in a table-like rack, between two massive metal rings which could be turned and tilted to work on one tone field after the other. Then I did my first hesitating hammer strokes.

Hopeless, I put down the hammer.

“I don’t know what’s off. It doesn’t do anything.”

“The same as the last time you asked me.”

Haha, look what stupid annoyance you are!

He didn’t bother to explain. I could just watch him fix it.

At some point I got aware that he had a paper hanging on the wall, next to his desk. It was an article with the headline: The short manifesto for relationship anarchy.

“Did you find something to read?”, he joked. “Take it down if you like.”

I couldn’t focus on it in that moment to understand what I was reading. Things were very mysterious and little obvious to me. But later it occurred me that there was a reason why this was hanging there at this moment.

Before I left we brought the La Sirena handpan with us to the forest. We sat down on a bench and played a bit.

"I don't know if I will manage myself if I start to get used to having you here”, he said. "Most time I'm better off being an artichoke. It's a French saying."

I stopped short, confused. He never explained a lot.

I returned to Stuttgart without a handpan, but with the one thought on my mind that I would come back, with more time, to work on my own instrument.

And to learn more about the artichoke, right?

Curious, I searched the internet for the article about relationship anarchy. The article told about questioning the norm of binding yourself to one person. It suggested allowing loving connections to evolve free of restrictions. Connections, which may be more loose or more close at moments.

You have capacity to love more than one person, and one relationship and the love felt for that person does not diminish love felt for another.

Each to their own, I thought. But I came back to reread it many times.

----

At the end of November I took that train again. In both anticipation and fear of failure I returned to the rustic palace.

"How much would you like to participate?", he asked.

"I would like to do as much as possible myself."

"I don't have many people saying that."

My former self had learned to be a good woman, or to pretend at least. I entered the workshop in slim fit clothes, bra, black skirt, make-up. Determined to learn as much as possible about crafting, I practiced tuning while he worked on my handpan. I spent hours more or less aimlessly hammering a shell in the cold garage, much of that with the feeling of not getting anywhere. My little advisors, the devil and the cat, were always arguing, never shutting up. Almost never.

On one of the first evenings, he showed me a documentation about the creation of the hang drum. We sat there in my guest room with a projector - “the only white wall in the house” - sharing a large blanket with a cover showing a green forest. He told me about his experience of meeting the creators shown in the video, and learning from them. He doze off a few times. The video ended. “I need to be cruel”, he said. He got up and, with my complaints, took the warm blanket with him – then wished me good night and went to his room. I didn’t want that he left. He knew it.

The next night, I heard his voice from his room when I went to bed. Hesitating, I peeked into the room. It was a very small chamber under a tilted roof – somewhat like a bunk in a boat. (Somewhat larger.) He had an orange table lamp standing on the floor which was formed like a snail. Next to it, he was lying on a round bed under the green blanket, his face and hair in the dim light a study in orange and black. He reminded me of someone who didn’t belong into this moment.

I sat onto the few stairs leading down into the room, playing on a handpan for a bit, but needed to stop because of my ear. When I got up, I heard his voice again: “Feel free to come here if you want to share the warmth.”

Confused, my heart beating heavily, I went down the stairs to the handpan room. There I sat for ten or fifteen minutes on the sofa, shivering, trying to sort my rushing emotions. For some reason I, again, was convinced that I had misunderstood something – maybe because I could not imagine that he would want to have me close.

There’s nothing to misunderstand about that. You want that. What are you waiting for?

My ear.

Your ear is okay.

Not sure.

If you wait longer, he’s going to think that he scared you.

But… how? How to accept?

Seriously? Just get your blanket and join him. Come on. You’re ready now, little girl.

With wobbly knees, I climbed back up the creaky stairs.

---

After a bit more than one week of decent hammering, we finished my instrument. For the first time, I heard the notes of my own handpan. I had chosen a Dorian scale which was related to the La Sirena scale, but more flexible for playing different melodies. Even just playing the scale was wonderful.

"The most difficult will be to let you go again”, I said. “When I leave here, I return to my life in Germany, and you return to yours."

"Will you be happy to be back in Germany?"

"No", I answered.

There was some silence while I tried to gather courage to ask my question.

Now or never.

"Do you want an apprentice?"

I returned to Stuttgart without an answer, but with my handpan, and played it with pride and love and a painful sting in my heart. I tried to accept that the answer might be No. That gone was gone.

I bound my hair to that loose knot, with some of it falling down. Then I went to the store, bought fresh vegetables and tried to do something with them. After a long time of rejection, I felt appreciated with my ways and potential, and after years of discussion and excuses, I felt desired again. I started sleeping naked and enjoyed it. I tried to accept to close the new, short chapter of beautiful adventure. But I couldn't. I had left my heart at that place. I had no other plan for my life and I couldn't see myself making one while all I could think of was coming back there. I had learned and found so much already – so much more than during these pointless years drained in the Stuttgart robot mentality.

Resigning, I started writing down my first French words. I needed to come back.

[A new born dream]

I read that article about relation anarchy again, and then again, to make sense of the range between affection and absent silence I had received from his side. To me, at that point of my life which was passing between the carefully trimmed front gardens of Stuttgart, the ideas described in the article felt very diffuse, and I found it hard to imagine what it actually meant in life. But a seed of wondering had started to grow. What could life be like if we allowed ourselves to love who we love - without owning each other, without needing to restrict each other - and without needing to deeply hurt someone else?

°rustle°

I bet it is the next taunt from the job agency!

You can keep it.

It’s him.

… give it to me, now.

He writes: Feel free to come back if you still feel like hammering.

It was December. I spent Christmas hammering steel in a cold workshop, wrapped in an increasingly dirty blanket, and, apart from my nagging insecurities, and my frustration of getting stuck, I thought this was the best Christmas I could have imagined.

Up to this point, my life had not allowed me to find much sexual confidence. This is mostly due to old heritage in a culture of restricting women and repression of sexual needs, lack of talk and acceptance.

Gathering confidence, I removed his hair tie and spread his long, wavy hair over his chest. The dim light made his eyes seem black. Watching his beautiful features, I felt, more than ever, that love, or attraction, does not ask for the age. I was glad that there was no one around to judge us. It was always a pleasure to see him enjoying something.

I rarely had been with a partner who touched me and showed desire, and I had not learned that I was free to show desire myself, to touch my partner in an intimate way or to take any intiative. On the other hand, I was greatly suffering of repressing and not making experiences, so much that I would have heavy arguments with my boyfriend, blaming him for neglecting me - resulting in nothing but a selffulfilling circle, of course.

Now that I was close again with someone I was very much attracted to, somewhere in my mind there was an idea of what I wanted, but loudest were doubts and worries about how I was, supposedly, expected to act. I needed trust and patience, and many occasions to fail, to be able to relax and just feel. And I needed to feel desired to get over my blockings and learn to enjoy, to communicate, and to be active. I found much of that during the time with him. It was inspiring and liberating, and I am grateful for his attention, touch and nudges, allowing me to get over much of my self doubt and, finally, embark on my own journey of discovering.

Sometimes he went down in the morning and started playing a handpan, before bothering to get dressed. It was about testing his freshly finished instruments from an artisan’s perspective - checking if the notes were stable, if any of the tones stood out from the others, be it by feeling dull or producing a ringing which he didn’t like. (Not sure if the not-getting-dressed-part was also professionally motivated, maybe not). He had put the tricky task on his agenda to figure out how to tune the high, ringing overtones of the bass note, so the note would sound appealing to players when they played rhythms on the sides of the tone field.

His way of playing was special. He didn’t think about music. He didn’t count a beat, practice a pattern or compose melodies. He made movements with his hands, intuitively, which produced tones, and varied them with confidence, sat upright, closed his eyes and moved his head while he was playing.

His music was free. I often thought about it when I was getting stuck in patterns and melodies playing in my mind. I was planning music. But there was much beauty to find in learning to discard patterns, and, instead, appreciating spontaneity and imperfection. With being confident with things as they are. Not only regarding music.

We talked much about scales, chords, which notes fit together and why.

I didn’t become his apprentice. I waited for long weeks, with a lump in my throat, directing the energy of painful uncertainty to listening to French podcasts and learning words. My progress felt painfully slow. Spoken French sounded to my German mind like a continuous, even stream of syllables, without any chance to know where one word ends and the next one starts, or how many letters have been skipped in between.

But I did move to Strasbourg to work together with them. The condition was that I would be independent and craft my own instruments. This, at first, sounded impossible to me. How should I deal with the French paperwork to manage independence, when I couldn’t even get through the German one...?

But of course I had no choice. It was a risky path, but it felt as if I didn’t have much to loose, but everything to win. A part of me had started to go down this path already months ago. I needed to take one step at the time, and deal with the problems one by one, as they arose.

The last weeks in Stuttgart were painful in a different way, driven by a burning energy. Next to fighting the screen to find a flat, I inspected my possessions, threw many things away and gave away most of my wardrobe. I returned to the workshop for a short while while visiting apartments and shared flats in the area, crossing the French town with an electric scooter I had borrowed from him. I explained things to my boyfriend, again and again, trying to scoop up enough sanity for both of us when both of us were in tears. I did not want to break up. But I wanted to be free. Our 3 years of shared hell had made none of us happy. I would move to Strasbourg and start my chapter of relationship anarchy. I would love who I love.

At the beginning of April I signed the contract for a room of 9m2 in a shabby shared flat. I would be living together with a Japanese student who did have any common languages with me, in the flat of a landlady who refused to speak anything else than French. It was the only place I could find which accepted a German with an unsure income situation.

I threw myself onto the bed in that empty room with uneven floor and broken door, listening to the voices from the street and cafes down on the road in the inner city of Strasbourg. I felt relieved, excited, grateful, deeply happy. I was free.

----

I spent the first week of my new life visiting an online friend in Paris. It is another story which needs to be told another time. After that, day by day I crossed the inner city of Strasbourg on my bike to get to the station, took the train to the village and cycled to the workshop. With big difficulties to focus, fear of failure but determination to prove myself, I practiced to manage the tools. I was most afraid of using the air hammer to shape the shell, and using the edge grinder to clean up the rim of a finished instrument - because each little shaking of hands was fatal. More than once I needed to swallow my pride and cross the yard to admit that I had destroyed something, or did not remember how to do something.

Often I worked late and stayed with him for a few days at a time, then returned to my flat to give him some space. I fought my way through the French supermarkets, carefully checking the ingredients of products which I did not know to find some basics suitable for daily vegan life. I considered the flat as a temporary solution and did not spend much time there – but, as you say, there’s nothing more steady than a temporary solution. Especially not in a country where agencies don’t rent out flats to people without work contracts.

It was not before two years had passed that I got aware that I was living between boxes, sharing the space with mice coming from the walls, and that it might be worth investing some time and money to turn it into an actually habitable place.

The summer season was festival season, and it was professional interest to be present at festivals in France (and around), keeping a stand and selling instruments. We packed a dozen instruments or more into their designated backpacks and carefully stacked them in the back of the camper van. There was hardly any space for anything else. The camper van had a little fridge, allowing to take some fruit and vegetables, spread and drinks with us. We filled a box with currants and raspberries from the bushes in the garden.

I waited on the passenger seat. He closed the door of the house behind him. He was dressed in white linen, his abundant, wavy mane freshly washed and bobbing with his steps. I was floating with happiness to join him on this trip. How lucky could you be, stumbling out of a hopeless situation into… this? I would never have dreamt that following the quest to get my handpan could lead to this. Never.

It was a long drive down to the South of France, passing through a country which I hardly knew anything about. Green road signs showed names of towns and numbers, staying back behind us. The countryside slowly changed from trees to brushes, from green to yellow. He asked me to put on music. I remember us leaving the road to find a place to rest for the night, placing the van on a small hill, looking over the countryside.

The first festival was not far from the sea, but far enough for the area to be very dry. The high frequent buzzing of cicadas was constantly around us. Other handpan makers - some of them coming from Spain or UK - set up their stands next to vendors of wooden instruments, colourful fringy clothing and art. Everyone knew everyone. I proudly placed the first four handpans which I had made on the tables, next to the instruments of my colleagues. During the day, temperatures climbed to 40°C and higher. The people closed their tents and disappeared somewhere, maybe to the beach. We stayed, pouring water over our heads and lying on the dry grass in the shadow of the tent, waiting for the temperatures to drop.

In the evening, the place came alive. He was very busy, talking to the other makers, friends and selling instruments to visitors. When temperatures had dropped a bit and the visitors went to see the concerts, he set up the notebook in the tent and sat there with hearing protection, hammering older instruments that visitors had brought here for retuning. When I watched him, I looked forward to sharing the small space in the van with him during the night, having him all for myself again, for a moment.

After the festival, we had some days to pass before the next festival. I had my small handheld recorder with me and collected sounds here and there. We spent a few days at lake Salagou – a remote lake with an old, abandoned little village and dry hills of red sand all around it. We swam in the warm lake and had long talks with other handpan makers visiting the place, presenting each other our instruments and philosophizing about our latest ideas and strategies of tuning.

We took a tour at the Grotte de Clamouse, a large cave enthroned over a stream cutting through the mountain. He took a handpan with him and played it in the cave for our group of tourists, answering lots of questions afterwards. It was inspiring to watch how easily and naturally he got the people engaged. It was a marketing strategy of someone not enjoying social media. It worked. He always had more emails coming in than he was happy to answer.

We stopped at a remote village in a valley, visiting an old friend of him who had a little farm with sheep. The village consisted merely of a narrow road, a few houses and a chapel. Then we visited the Pech de Burarach, an isolated mountain watching over the region, and went for a hike up to the steep cliffs. The second festival was at a small river flowing between forested hills.

I’m grateful to have been able to see these places, to meet all these people, even though I could not join the French discussions and often was tired, struggled with ear noise and needed to withdraw. And I'm infinitely grateful to have been granted the years of healing in the small refuge outside of the life of companies and, mostly, social pressure. That I got this strong inspiration from him about living a life life offset from social norms.

Life during this time was not free of struggles. Worst was being so dependent on him for almost everything, and more and more, feeling that I was stressing him. Many times I took the last train home, exhausted from work and in pain because he kept me on distance. There was much more to learn about not binding yourself to one person, leaving someone their space, allowing things to evolve – sometimes in another direction that you wish for. About welcoming pain as a price for all the good things that happened. For one year, I had focused every bit of energy and desire on him and his world which had given me so much. I needed to come back to who I really was myself. To the activities and projects which I had deprioritized, which I missed. Find my own balance. It hurt to let go, but deep inside I knew that sometimes you need to travel apart, to make it possible to evolve yourself – and, who knows? Maybe – if something really sticks and matters - find back together one day, enriched.

Sophie, 12/2023