and felt as if everyone was staring in at me. More precisely, we bought material and curtain-rings and a curtain-rod, and I sewed it in to curtains.A month later, someone mentioned casually that the shutters on their window were stiff. I asked myself what shutters these were, and later examined my window more carefully. It turned out that I had window shutters too -- it was just that they were the clever German sort that roll down the outside when you twist a little stick on the inside, and I'd never even noticed them. They were wonderful. But I didn't want to look oafish. So I went sour-grapes, and let on that I'd spent the six hours sewing curtains not because I didn't know about the wonderful window shutters, but because I didn't like them.
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Over lunch one day in the university cafeteria, some of my classmates started laughing in a not-too-malevolent way about our differential geometry lecturer, who was Australian, and sometimes while lecturing twisted up his German words in little ways like pronouncing the German word "Mannigfaltigkeit" [English "manifold"] as "Mannifoldikeit". After they pointed it out to me, I started noticing it too. Then I started noticing the little half-giggle that went around the class each time it happened. (Deep down, Germans are proud of how difficult their language is.) Then, for camouflage, I started joining in occasionally too.
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I found myself in Rome one January Sunday morning, prying open a heavy door in a tall windowless wall of a big blocky building on a sidestreet, and discovering inside a Baroque church, just as a random website had promised me the night before. Moreover, it was a romantic decaying Baroque church, with sixth-century foundations and an interior by a famous seventeenth-century architect called Francesco Borromini and peeling gold-leaf curlicues all over the walls. And, moreover, it was a tiny romantic decaying Baroque church, just big enough for the twenty nuns who were seated hymn-singing at the front and the nine parishioners who eventually gathered for morning Mass and for us.
I found it fascinating, and beautiful, and also a little sad. The nuns were subdued, and their singing wavering; their faces were hard to read. Altogether I couldn't help thinking that nowadays being a nun -- or, at least, being a nun, and maintaining your belief in the importance of what you do, without the constant external reassurance you would have had from the calling five hundred years earlier (back when admiration for nuns was widespread and passionate, and convents were very prosperous) -- must be sometimes a difficult business.
After the service, one of the nuns stayed behind to show the old church to two little boys who'd been brought by their father.
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Late the last night of term, I was out in town with friends, and we were cold and decided to go hang out at one of their apartments. So we separated to go pick up our bicycles from where we'd parked them, and met up again in town centre. Then we all cycled out to Sarah's through the dark empty streets: fast and smooth and quiet and swerving round each other. Like geese in a flock. Or witches on broomsticks.
