Woodpecker

Chapter 3 / Sam 2 / 2 x 3 x 13 Days Left

At university, Sam had spent the second year of her modern languages degree in Amsterdam on Erasmus. She always had a knack for picking up languages quickly, speaking French and German with reasonable fluency by the time she was sixteen. She was excited at the prospect of being able to spend a year immersing herself in West Germanic literature and learning Dutch. Other than a short exchange trip to Paris while at school, it was her first experience of living for an extended time in a foreign country. The university had made most of the important preparations for her. A room in shared accommodation was ready and waiting and all the utility bills were paid as part of the program. Sam only had to take care of her food and a few other incidental expenses from her student loan, plus a small quarterly grant that she received as part of a scheme to help children of single parents. The transition from England to Holland was easy, and the difference quite small with all her flat mates being English too.

Sam's first year at university had gone well and she had taken the step up from A-level to university degree in her stride. Her language skills were near the top of the class and more than a match for the other students on the course, including those with expensive private educations. She didn't know why but these students had always made Sam feel flustered, insecure in her own worth. It wasn't that they were nasty to her or anything, in fact she quite liked most of them, but something in the way they carried and expressed themselves always made her slouch into herself and cram up in their company. But as freshers year progressed and her tutors started to pay her work compliments, she began for the first time to appreciate her own academic abilities and grew in confidence.

The other students on the course were mad about Goethe. Sam, having never had the chance to study him at her school went to the library and took out a copy of Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers, the Suffering of the Young Werther. Written as a collection of letters to a friend the novel tells the story of a young man who becomes besotted with a woman, Charlotte, who is set to marry another man. He burns with obsessive love for her, like an untreatable disease, but his circumstances mean she can never be his. At one point the young man finds himself cast out from a gathering of the aristocracy. His blood isn't blue enough, a part that always reminded Sam of how she felt in the presence of some of her classmates. Seeing again the now married Charlotte, Werther's love crescendos in inverse proportionality to his despair. In a deep depression he realizes that solace can only be found if one from this love triangle dies. Taking a pistol gifted by Charlotte, Werther commits suicide. Charlotte for her part mourns the loss of her friend and her part in it for the rest of her life.

The story would become like a premonition of Sam's year in Amsterdam. Later she would wonder if the very act of reading Werther had sown the seeds of what happened. A literary portent of the future. A subtle reprograming of her mind and emotions, so moved by the story as she was. Could a book have that much power? To change who a person is or what might happen to them in life. Books bringing down kings.

Whatever the case, her reading of this story led to her winning a prestigious essay writing prize in the university's language department. Her essay, "A Shot in the Head: Goethe's Werther and 1984. Love of Woman, Love of State" was a comparison of Goethe's work with Orwell's 1984, which ends the same way with the book's central character committing suicide by gunshot, though for a very different kind of love. It bagged her a five-hundred-pound prize but more importantly the respect of her tutors and peers. On the back of her achievement, as well as very good if not first-class grades, she was enthusiastically recommended for the Erasmus program.

As well as studying hard in those first few months abroad she got to know the other four people who lived on her floor. They all got on well and did what students do. Going out drinking, partying hard, and not sleeping enough. It seemed to Sam all these years later that she had spent those first months in unceasing exhausted rapture. The laughter never stopped. Carefree, independent, and far from home she felt a freedom that was fresh and precious like a hatchling newly fledged. But she was also at nineteen years old more naïve than she understood and hadn't yet learnt that precious things were delicate and easily broken.