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Photo: Benjamin Maack / DER SPIEGEL
From the living room I can hear the high heels tumbling.
I'm confused.
I call my wife's name.
"Is that you?" I ask.
"Yes," comes the cheerful next door.
"Do you wear high heels in the apartment?"
"Yes," she replies just as happily.
"Why?"
"Because I'm fine, because we don't have Corona, because we have visitors for the first time since Christmas."
Right.
Christmas.
My mother came to see us on Christmas Eve.
Before she left home, we had done tests that we had gotten through wrong turns.
When we were advised by a professional over the video phone how deep we should stick the chopsticks into our noses (insanely deep, so deep that it feels like poking your brain), we felt a bit like Criminal.
Actually, we shouldn't have such tests.
They weren't for us.
Why?
Why couldn't everyone just do such tests?
We didn't know that.
But that was how we could meet my mother, the children could spend Christmas Eve with their grandma without having to fear that they might be sent to an intensive care unit.
It's even more exciting this Saturday: we meet friends.
In our kitchen.
With coffee and cake.
I don't even remember when we last had a real visitor.
Was it the end of November?
Beginning of December?
But I still remember very well that we were sitting in one corner of the kitchen and our friend in the other, right next to the open window.
And I remember it felt a little like she wasn't a guest, but a danger.
After she left, we opened all the windows as if trying to exorcise the very last of her from our bladder of sane.
Five times freedom: 24.99 euros
The day we buy ourselves a few hours of normalcy at Aldi begins with a heated argument.
My wife and I get out of bed shortly after seven in order to be at Aldi on time.
The discounter has corona tests on offer.
As the first shop to be allowed to sell them freely.
24.99 euros for five tests, each customer only one pack.
End-time scenarios play out in my head.
Huge pyramids of test packs that an excited mob would pick to pieces and buy up within minutes.
Endless queues at the cash registers, cashiers who, with tunnel vision, bring freedom to the people with the five boxes.
When we arrive two minutes past eight, a till is open.
Three or four people are lining up.
I see the cashier fiddling with a green package from under her table and laying it down for a customer - and I want to go to the checkout immediately.
I'm fully into the end-of-time movie
"I'll get a few more things for a minute," says my wife.
I look at her confused and hurry to the end of the short line.
I'm still fully into the end-of-time movie.
I get my test.
The cashier scans my debit card, then it's the next one.
Somehow I had imagined that receiving a test box would be more like an awards show, or the moment you get a super rare extra in a video game.
Pling!
ZOOOOOOOMMM.
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There is the thing: Corona rapid test from the discounter
Photo: Benjamin Maack / DER SPIEGEL
Is not it.
The cashier continues to collect, I sit down on one of the benches in the shopping arcade and wait for Friederike.
Two minutes, four minutes.
It is only ten or twelve minutes past eight when a moment of irritation creeps through the checkout line.
The cashier explains to the first customer that the tests are sold out.
It couldn't have been 50 packages that she pulled out from under her cash register, more like 20 or 30. Friederike also got nothing.
Instead of a pack of tests, she stuffs a pack of tortellini into her backpack, then opens one of those mini ginger drinks and throws it down.
And I act like an idiot.
“Phew, it's cool that you went shopping beforehand.
The tortellini would have been sold out nationwide at eight-thirty. "
Of course there is trouble.
Because of course Friederike is much more angry with herself than I am with her.
It takes half the walk home until we can talk to each other to some extent again - and notice that it was a totally anti-social idea anyway to get two boxes from the few tests.
After all, someone else still has the chance to meet someone.
Finally again.
And with less fear of infecting yourself or others.
Hello little lockdown baby!
The test of our guests in the hallway is quite a hello.
If the welcoming ritual, which everyone has to stick a stick up their noses very deeply, before they sit down together for coffee and cake, didn't exist from now on, it would have to be invented.
In the weeks before, we were so overwhelmed with the lockdown rules that the question of how many people you can actually meet never arose.
And now we're so excited to see other people again that we're breaking the rules.
I didn't notice it until later: The guests are not just an adult plus child, as would already be permitted, but a friend, her husband and their baby.
The meeting of two households has been talked about for days, but it will only be allowed again from Monday.
The little one is four months old and we're seeing him for the first time.
I have to remember that the period that seems long to us is his whole life.
This round faced blonde guy is a lockdown baby.
It must all be total madness for him.
The strange voices, the new smells.
At the age of four and eight, our children have also spent quite a part of their lives with Corona.
At a distance, masks, not hugging.
The little one hasn't been in daycare since the end of December, the big one no longer in school.
We two adults are not just their family, but their teachers, playmates, friends - and no matter how hard we try, we are worse than the originals in everything.
What a strange life it must be for a child.
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"Coffee?" - "Yes, please."
Photo: Benjamin Maack / DER SPIEGEL
Bright spot in the corona hangover?
But now we are sitting there.
Around the table together.
In our time bubble, bought at Aldi, normality.
"Coffee?"
"Yes, please."
"With or without milk?"
A few hours of security.
How much time do we have exactly?
How high is the security?
And is that safe enough for us?
We do not know that, yet.
But what we do know: The meeting is wonderful.
How often we will and can afford these tests when they are freely available in many stores from next week.
How many bubbles we can buy
We still have to think about that too.
It is even more important that the government gives everyone who cannot spend 25 euros for a meeting each time the freedom to test normalcy for themselves for a few hours.
This day is an important and valuable ray of hope in the endless corona hangover, a reminder of what we all had once.
It's wrong that this freedom, that coffee and cake with friends just under a year ago was downright silly.
In the evening I read what the rapid test can do.
On average, he recognizes 88 percent of infections.
That's not bad I think.
Then I realize that this value probably relates to the first week after the onset of symptoms.
But one is contagious even before that.
The test is just a snapshot.
So can he really give the freedom that we have taken today?
The first and the last test meeting
We isolate ourselves strictly, wear FFP2 masks (I even shaved my beard because of it), and only meet friends outside on a walk.
But do we get too close to someone when we shop?
Do we have the heart to separate the children rigorously enough every time they play and fight outside with other children?
Do we really keep the full one and a half to two meters apart every time we sit on a bench with appointments in the spring cold?
Or whether someone has the new virus mutant and infects us despite all precautionary measures?
We cannot say any of this with certainty.
And these tests do not tell us whether we infect others or can be infected by them.
Just whether we are acutely ill.
That is much.
This is important.
If used correctly, the antigen tests are an important milestone in our struggle with corona.
But unfortunately they do not change anything in our current togetherness for me.
Tonight, when the text is finished, I'll go to bed sad.
I'll hug my wife and tell her what I know now.
And that I unfortunately cannot repeat such a meeting with a test again.
I will hug her and be glad that I have her and the children.
Three people who are around me, whom I touch, with whom I can romp, cuddle, argue and get along again.
That's more than far too many people have right now.
And that's why we all have to hold out a little longer.
Icon: The mirror
