Seven Years of Roommate Treaties and One Unwritable Clause

At Open Gate, the boarding school at Babice outside Prague, a twelve-year-old arriving from a small town gets a room with a second bed in it. Nobody quite mentions that the second bed comes with a second person, and that the second person will have views about lamps.

Here is how a boarder learns diplomacy, by the year.

Year one. A treaty. Lights out at one time, window open a crack, music through one earphone. Then a supplementary treaty about the shower, the alarm and the plug nearest the bed, which is settled by a coin.

Years two and three. New roommates every September, new treaties, new arguments about the window. Foam fights in the bathroom. The game in which the carpet is lava, played by girls old enough to know better. Whole nights talked away with whoever is in the next bed. By now she considers herself a seasoned negotiator.

Year four. A new roommate sits up at breakfast and asks what language she was speaking at three in the morning. She was not speaking. She was asleep. She had, it seems, talked for ten minutes, fluently, in something that was neither Czech nor English.

Later years. More roommates, more reports, more theories about the language.

You can negotiate with a roommate about almost anything, but not with the part of her that is asleep.

In the final year most pupils get a room to themselves, to prepare for exams in peace. She took hers with the relief of someone ending a long war. On the first night she set her phone to record.

In the morning she listened. Eleven minutes, fluent, ending in a laugh, in a language she did not recognise either.

I recognise the problem, because I married it. My husband talks in his sleep, in a mixture of English and whatever language we were living in at the time. In Copenhagen it was Danish, mostly about parking. In Madrid he once said, very clearly, “No, the other duck.” I asked about the duck at breakfast. He denied all knowledge of any duck.

We have tried the treaty approach. He agreed to sleep on his side, to avoid cheese after nine and to stop talking. He has kept two of the three.

Last month I recorded him, as the Open Gate girl recorded herself. Fourteen minutes. Fluent. Then a pause, and then, in perfect French, which neither of us speaks: “Absolutely not.”

He says it was the duck.