Noemi Somalvico was born in Solothurn in 1994 and studied literary writing in Biel and contemporary arts practice in Bern. Her stories and poems have been performed, published in magazines and anthologies and read on the radio. Her debut novel Is This The Other Side, Asks Pig (Ist hier das Jenseits, fragt Schwein) was published by V&Q in 2022 and won multiple awards. ‘Living In A Tin Can’ is taken from her short story collection The Heart It Casts No Shadow In The Chest (Das Herz wirft in der Brust keinen Schatten, Verlag Voland & Quist GmbH, Berlin und Dresden 2024).
Rob Myatt is an award-winning translator from German, Polish, Danish, Swedish, Russian and Luxembourgish into English. He was the recipient of the Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation 2023 for his translation of an extract from Behzad Karim Khani’s debut novel Dog Wolf Jackal. His literary translations have appeared in journals such as Turkoslavia, MayDay and The Dodge and he has worked with publishers including Granta, Rowohlt, Hanser, Cyranka and V&Q. In his spare time, he enjoys writing creepy horror movies and ghost stories and trying to learn how to finally do a proper hockey stop. You can find him on Bluesky or his website.
LIVING IN A TIN CAN
by Noemi Somalvico, translated from the German by Rob Myatt
I tried to make a fresh start but the trees had only just begun to cast off their leaves, and I ran from the shower, freezing, and threw on any old clothes. It seemed as if I were living out the remains of a year, one that had perhaps begun with plenty of promise. I wasn’t living anywhere anymore; I wasn’t living on in some love story anymore, either.
You need a new place, said my sister.
On her sofa, I had peculiar dreams. In one, I was living with seagulls, incubating their eggs. They were small eggs and I kept standing up to see if they were still intact. In another, I was tasked with hollowing out a mountain with a sort of scoop. I was tired when I woke up. I folded the blanket even though it was damp with my night sweats.
How taxing the city seemed to me, noisy and cluttered.
What? my sister sniggered. This city is a village! What would you call Beijing?
I had no idea what I would call Beijing.
I bought some fries to cheer myself up—that tends to do the trick—fries with ketchup or just fries on their own. With a sprinkle of the inevitable: salt.
Yet still, my well-being toppled over with every gust of wind.
I didn’t want to spend another evening alone in her apartment so I went with my sister to a party in a townhouse somewhere in the city center. The wardrobe was one of those walk-in ones and as I entered the lounge in socks, I noticed that most people were perched on heels that mimicked the stems of their champagne flutes.
I’ll keep one eye on the clock, said my sister, see who’s last out the door.
She waved to somebody.
I know how to entertain myself, I said and went over to the buffet.
After several conversations that were nearly all identical, as if each were a template for the next, hot off the press, I withdrew to a bathroom. Hadn’t I read somewhere that no one on this planet ever finds the life that belongs to them? I sat on a toilet seat and thought about a life that would vaguely suit me and which was now languishing somewhere, unlived. It wasn’t playing out in this bathroom, that life.
I opened the mirrored cabinet and picked out one of the perfumes, spraying OPTIMIST on my neck. I helped myself to fake eyelashes, rouge, and began to apply make-up in a sort of secret mission.
Taking every item I found, I applied it however I fancied. Drawing lines and painting over every available surface. Running a dark pencil around my lips. Making different pouty faces, as if I needed to seduce myself, touching my tongue to my teeth, hissing.
Now, a man in a white shirt professed an interest in me, in my obfuscation. He explained that he was a curator at a gallery. I did a little bow, which made him giggle. For a second, I thought he might also be a member of the club but then he straightened up again, in all his glory, and I knew that he was all there upstairs and that his forehead was always this shiny, as if a camera team were coming by later to film a segment for sharp Japanese knives on it.
I had no sympathy for him, only for his little giggle that I was never going to hear again, and I took him by his delicate curator hand and led him through the house. We stopped in front of every picture and every statue and I would squeeze a sentence out of him.
After the tour he said, I would love to treat you to a little something something.
So we sat by the marble bar, sipping sweet drinks and no sooner had I put my drained glass on the counter than it was full again.
The alcohol coursed down into my feet, then back up to my lips and I pulled the curator into the corner, by the Rodin statue, and kissed him with seven lipsticks. Then we lay down in one of the umpteen rooms, his face full of color, pink, violet, apricot orange—not that he was any the wiser—and gazed up at the lamps.
I said, That lamp looks like a buoy.
He said, Its outline is a circle.
He wanted to keep on kissing, but I mustered all the seriousness in my face: A kiss is a refuge for unprocessed thoughts. I guess I was hoping to find some sort of answer in your mouth. Instead, we just swapped saliva.
A good job we did too, said the curator.
A brief moment of silence.
I don’t even know your name, he said.
Guess.
Emilie?
Yes, I said, getting up, drifting over to the window.
My name is Emilie Gild. You can tell me what characteristics you think suit me. So far, all I know is that I’m not good at listening. And that instead of a heart in my chest, I have nothing. So feel free to shove someone else’s in there if you’ve got one lying around.
You haven’t been even remotely heartless to me, Emilie, said the curator.
I swirled the drink in one direction, then the other.
That’s because I’ve got a faint sense of humor. Humor I’ve got, but not a heart.
I paused. Looked down at myself. All the way to the tiptoes of my socks. There was certainly some truth to the things I was starting to invent about this person called Emilie Gild. I blossomed briefly and feverishly, for a whole three minutes, until my blossoms collapsed in on themselves.
My sister had already gone back to her apartment. I closed the door to the townhouse behind me; the curator still had a few questions but I had nothing left to say.
A few people were smoking in front of the house.
She’s off already, said one.
It had been raining and the cold sobered me up. I knew the way to my sister’s apartment so well that taking a wrong turn was not an option. I walked. Not looking in the store windows where my bleary, colorful face sailed on by. I walked with the feet on the ends of my legs, these feet stepped on leaves that had fallen early from the trees and carried me back to my temporary dwelling.
Every morning, my sister put out a glass of orange juice for me, and by the time I would wake up she had already grabbed her bike, hung up her jacket on an unfamiliar hook and given a talk in a gray, evenly ventilated room.
On one Friday afternoon, I left her apartment and joined a queue along a rough-hewn wall. At three PM on the dot, the prospective tenant at the very front of the line pressed the bell. All the aspiring renters behind her heard the buzz of the door as it was unlatched and wondered whether this buzz would be their buzz.
In a brown leather armchair, nearly a hundred years old, sat the tenant; he didn’t introduce himself, didn’t say anything about the apartment either. He just looked up for a moment as if a long line of prospective tenants slithering about his apartment in their outdoor shoes were a daily occurrence.
Then he turned back to the TV that was showing a replay of the Olympics. An athlete soaring over a bar on her pole.
I turned away from the screen and walked through each room once until I was back by the armchair where a commentator was gushing, What dynamism! Could we ever have expected that from Isinbayeva?
A few potential tenants were attempting to emphasize their interest by leaving a room, only to disappear into that same room a moment later with an expression of deep contemplation.
And the application form? the prospector who had pressed the bell asked me.
I shrugged.
I headed for the train station, quite unmoved. The bushes bobbled about in a breeze that moved into my ears and passed right through me, with a chill.
It was the end of September; I ducked into an Asian supermarket and bought a tin of pineapples, handing the cashier the tin and three francs. Maybe I would like to live in a tin can. I laughed and to be friendly the cashier joined in.
The pineapple rings were best before 2041. They would have been the same rings whether I ate them that same day or twenty years later. Only, perhaps, if I had been hungry, I would have sat beneath that monument and poured out the viscous goo. Ring by ring, I would have —
But like I said, I wasn’t hungry, so I disappeared the tin into my jacket and caught the 102 out to the countryside. In the city, it took all my energy just to stay alive. To not get run over, overrun, outmaneuvered, led astray, gobbled up.
I looked out the window at a harvested field of corn and saw a cat. She was arching her back, defecating on the countryside. She had a squirmy look in her eye, as if she didn’t wish to be caught in the act. I felt awkward, a bit like the awkwardness I felt whenever I watched two beetles mating. It lasted what seemed like an eternity, the cat’s tail quivering like a livewire.
Hello?
I looked up; the bus driver had stood up in his seat.
End of the line!
He waved the newspaper with his hand, as if I needed shooing.
You cloth-eared or what?
I stumbled out.
I peered into unfamiliar gardens. Ponds and gnomes, gubbins, stones. I peered into unfamiliar gardens, as if looking into inner worlds turned outwards. There wasn’t a person about and the village was so unspectacular that it did me good.
I had reached the final house where I saw a forlorn woman in her garden. She was hugging the ground, sniffling softly. Her hair was long and smooth and spread out on the grass. I hurried past, but immediately felt ashamed of the excuse I had so hastily made about my trepidation: that the woman wanted to be left to her unhappiness in peace. So I turned back and spoke to the sad lady.
It was pretty much as I had imagined: her goose had died. What she was hugging was its grave. The woman’s eyes were puffy. I listened to her a while and soon I completely understood why she had lain down there and shed a hundred tears or more.
There’s not a single thing allowed to remain, I said. That’s the way it is, I’m afraid.
She blew her nose again in a tissue.
I told her I was also a tad despondent, but for a different reason. She didn’t press me on what that reason was, but she did pause for a moment, a moment that I should have spoken into, should have filled with my story. Instead, I said my goodbyes and wished her good luck.
Behind the village began a forest. The branches played with the light on their tops; they seemed a little tipsy from the wind. I stepped inside and felt myself being swallowed up.
If I didn’t like the city, then could I please like the forest and the fields, could I please pitch a tent beneath a pair of tall pine trees and could I please fall into a deep sleep and not wake up just because a hedgehog has come bumbling through the undergrowth?
Having traversed an assortment of lines and circles for a time, my desire to find an edge returned. Sometimes, I wondered whether in the long run, a person is ever cut out to be a person. I felt as if I did not understand my own form. From then on, I tried walking straight forwards, towards where I assumed the setting sun to be. At one point, I heard a deer or a fox spluttering.
At the forest edge, I sat down on a bench; the light demanded cherishment. I took the tin of pineapple rings out of my jacket pocket. I pulled but not with the right force and the ring on the lid tore off.
Instead of returning the can to my pocket, I threw it into the grass in front of me a few times and each time I scooped it up, unscathed and undented, I felt something strange, a sort of absurd amusement, because I knew that soon enough I would throw it on the grass again and then pick it up, again. On one occasion, as the thing soared up in rather a high curve, I pined for my sister.
It was a physical phenomenon, like someone had emptied a bucket of memories over me. How strange, that out of nowhere I would begin to miss a person who was ten miles away, all because of a tin can arcing through the air at a certain angle, at a certain speed.
When I am alone for a long time, I am quickly overcome by a dizziness and if nothing happens to undo my lonesomeness, the dizziness spills over into lethargy, a sheer inability to move. It seemed I would never be able to get up again; I was heavier, heavier than my own weight and slumped over to one side.
The wood was dry beneath my cheek and for a brief moment I lacked for everything. In that flash of fatigue, I felt the fatigue of my entire being and in the crowing of a bird, I heard the crowing of all birds. In this mood, which felt like a small, soundless defeat, I drifted off to sleep.
When I reached the bus stop two hours later, the buses had stopped running.
I’m lost, I said, because I could not even take care of myself properly, because I was hungry and tired, and also because lost was such a tragic word and very nearly brightened my spirits again.
I wondered to myself whether I would open the door, if I lived in one of those houses? Whether I would I take in a complete stranger for a night? Yes, alright. You can sleep on the straw with the rabbits. Without thinking, I grabbed my hair and pressed it against my head, so as to give the illusion that it was styled in some way.
So, I said, kicking a foot up off the ground and letting it fall again. There’s never a wrong time for a ‘So’. I wanted something to happen, now, something that would shake up my life for good.
It was Helene, the women who missed her goose, who ultimately picked me up. After a few short minutes, we were back at the house at the edge of the village. She told me she had been to the city to give someone a vacuum cleaner.
I looked at her from the side. Her sadness had been wiped away, leaving behind a tranquil smile that looked as if it had been nailed to her face as an after-thought.
I wondered if I looked like that too, if I was also carrying around a sort of emptiness in my gaze and I squinted in the rear-view mirror. Squinting, my eyes looked quite spry and not even slightly dulled.
Do you live in the city? she asked.
I’m not living anywhere right now, I replied.
Oh, okay, she said.
I didn’t know that the last bus —
Her kitchen was neat and tidy, a cushion on every chair.
Above the kitchen sink, I noticed, hung the photo of the goose. Snow-white and proud, like a swan.
Pretty, your goose, I wanted to say, but now my belly was rumbling. I pulled back a chair, making enough of a racket to cover up the noises from my insides.
Helene fixed something to eat. She took a jar out of the fridge with pickles in it. Then she put bread and cheese out, too.
As she stabbed a pickle with her fork, I remembered the question a person can ask themselves to tell if they are dreaming: How many fingers do I have?
I had five on each hand.
From the way you eat, I would say that you are very determined, said Helene.
I felt myself blushing.
I haven’t eaten anything since midday, I said.
The way you hold the fork, I mean. You are plucky.
It seemed she was being serious. I tried to hazard a guess at her age; she couldn’t have been much older than me, yet she lived away from the city, in a whole house with a garden.
Now, Helene pushed the dishes to one end of the table and placed her elbow in the middle. She had a slender forearm and as I placed mine next to hers, I suddenly felt invincible and pushed her arm down to the tabletop without breaking a sweat.
It depends on the time of day, I said, apologetically.
She smiled, apparently pleased that I had won the arm wrestle.
You’re strong and beautiful and resilient and plucky. And with that, I wish you goodnight, she said.
She had shown me where I could sleep. A room with a mattress on the floor and nothing else. And in this nothing I had no dreams, I sank into sleep like a stone in a pond.
The next morning, there was a note lying on the table. I read it. Went to the window. Back to the table. Felt the pot of coffee that was sat there and which was now only distantly warm. I read it again: I’m off. Here is the life I have begun. The house is two-hundred and fifty years old. You can have everything.
Through the window, I saw the light, the grass was swarming with it. I saw that it must have been the place it was yesterday but it was as if my perception of it had been replaced, my perspective changed: the house sat differently on the street, beside the fence, beneath the sky. I stepped out into the garden, my face unable to decide on an expression.
Later, I was pulling out weeds from between the stone slabs. You are strong, Helene had said, strong and plucky. Buttercup, dandelion. Sometimes, I would come across a worm or a few firebugs and they remained my only company, besides the guy who walked past the fence and said hello, a great big white dog in tow. As the sun withdrew over the roof, I slipped into one of her jackets and smoked one of her cigarettes. You can have everything. I smelled the collar of the jacket where there was a scent like plaster, her scent probably. For a second, I thought what I had not wanted to think all day long: was she still alive? And would a person who knows they are not coming back leave behind a pack with three cigarettes in it?
Later, I sat at Helene’s table, flicking through a magazine without reading it. I was waiting for someone to leap out of a cupboard and explain that this was all a rather elaborate joke. I continued flicking through the pages; a delicate sound gave me goosebumps. It was as if someone was walking around the table in baggy trousers, the fabric of the legs brushing against one another with every step.
You need a place, my sister had said. You need a nook. A hidey-hole where you can regenerate. You don’t need much, but you do need a place.
They say no one gets what they want. Not the apartment they need and not the memories. Not the siblings and not the love story that suits them. Maybe, someone had rolled on the stockings that were my life, the one that would have fit me skin and nail, and was now living out my life however they fancied.
I had flicked through the magazine to the very last page. On the back was Helene’s address and her full name. It’s a beautiful house you have here, Helene L. Propp, a life begun which you wish to leave to me. I pushed the chair back. But I have things to do, I said, reaching for my jacket, the tin inside, and hurrying along the street towards the bus station. I turned around once, abruptly, but there was no one there. Just the house at the end of the road, keeping its distance from the other houses in the village, a shadow slumped.