Schadenfreude, a Love Story Page 19

  Hsu was a Taiwanese guy who normally lived in Paris, a graduate student in translation, and a stellar product of the old-school Asian system of language-learning, which involves a lot of grammar work and almost no conversation. It took him about ten minutes to get out a sentence, but that sentence was always perfect. Goran was another Serb, a pompous medical student on vacation who “collected” languages as “hobbies,” as he put it, pompously. Zoë was from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, sent to improve her German by the wealthy family for whom she worked as an au pair. She spoke perfectly already, but put all her empha-SES on the wrong sylla-BLES. And then there were three other Americans: first, John, a retiree who had just moved to Berlin with his boyfriend. His German-language skills seemed based entirely on repeated viewings of Wagner’s Ring cycle, and he brought the word Nibelungen into more conversations than you’d think was relevant. Finally, there were two undergraduates on a study-abroad program. My fellow Landsleute didn’t have to identify themselves as such; I recognized the same flat vowels, forced umlauts, softened rs, and misplaced verbs that plagued my own conversations and gave me away. Wie lange bist du hier? (“How long have you been here?” or, literally, “How long are you here?”) Für zwei Monate. (“For two months,” a construction Germans do not use. They just say “two months,” or sometimes “since two months.”) As the class settled down, I plunked myself between the two Serbs.

  “Du siehst genau wie eine Porzellanpuppe aus!”

  (“You look just like a porcelain doll!”)

  This was the teacher’s way of acknowledging me as a new student, before she handed out one of the most brutal grammar worksheets I’d ever seen. We were to decline compound-adjectival phrases cold:

  “I saw a three-weeks-overdue, out-in-the-rain-left-until-it-got-soggy library book.”

  “I should have gone to the cinema with my didn’t-attend-school-so-he-doesn’t-know-how-to-read cousin from Hamburg.”

  After school let out for the day, the undergrads and I reverted to our native ways to learn more about each other.

  “Hey!” I said. “Does either of you want to come with me on a sort of nostalgia tour through whatever’s left of dirty Kreuzberg?”

  My hopes were particularly high for Declan, a lanky twenty-three-year-old senior, also from Oregon (a plus), who had the same haircut as Richard Ashcroft from the band the Verve (a double-plus).

  “I’d love to!” he said. “Only thing is, I’m straight-edge and I don’t drink.”

  His friend Callista could pencil in some free time in approximately two and a half weeks, but until then she was way too busy with her studies. Studies? In Berlin? Teetotaling? IN BERLIN? Motherfuck. The Serbs were no better—the one only hung out at her lesbian commune, and I couldn’t risk asking the other to do anything social, because he would immediately assume I was sexually interested in him, and I could just tell he would absolutely relish rejecting me. (I was not sexually interested in him in the least, because he was a pompous asshole.) Mu-Yuan was always busy with her vile-sounding forty-five-year-old husband, and I was too impatient to try to have a full conversation with Hsu. Johannes and Paul, meanwhile, my alleged Berlin crew, had founded some sort of legitimate computer business in their living room a few years back; they now had legitimate offices, employees, and clients and were, as Johannes put it, eh immer bei der Arbeit, which is the German expression my new host mom had translated literally to mean “always at work.”

  Thus, after what turned out to be a misleadingly exciting first few days, I spent most evenings in Berlin sitting at Frau Blodau’s kitchen table while she drank and cried, nudging the conversation into German by never uttering a word of English no matter what she said or did, and drinking straight from a bottle of Jägermeister I bought at the grocery store, which I used to wash down my Abendessen of fifteen cigarettes, two bags of Erdnussflips, and a chocolate baton. My landlady loved dubbed episodes of Friends, and who was I to begrudge a grieving woman her Central Perk? I never got any potatoes with béchamel sauce, but I did learn that the German for How YOU doin’? is Na … wie GEHT’s denn so? Where was the Berlin I needed, to debauch away the loneliness that threatened to claw me to strips? What a waste of money my new artisanal travel journal was, given that all it contained was a note about a new vocabulary word I learned: Lebensgefährtin, which means “life partner.” It is, I’d scrawled wryly, no doubt distracted by German Monica and Ross in the background, near-identical to the word Lebensgefahr, which means “mortal danger.” Ha ha ha ha ha.

  Luckily the unseasonably chilly May had finally given way to a weekend of hot weather, and on cue all of Berlin—which spends its pitch-dark 3:00 P.M. winter afternoons in helpful illustration of the vocabulary word trübselig, which means “cheerless,” but literally translates to “blessed with drear”—had exploded onto the sidewalks and into the parks. There was but one word that stood between me and some desperately needed mirth: Picknick. A German Picknick is different from its gingham-blanketed, letter-k-bereft, Stepford-inflected American counterpart in several ways. First, the provisions. While a well-stocked American basket might contain a stack of ham sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade, Germans (and expatriates in an Oberstufe class) will descend upon a Picknick as if it were a potluck during the apocalypse, with foodstuffs piled higher than the Berlin Wall (most of which requires a real metal knife and fork to consume, which of course they also bring)—and, of course, alcohol, which is consumed legally, openly, and with great Lebensfreude in the out-of-doors.

  “You guys!” I declared to the class on a Friday morning so blindingly sunny it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually seen the sun—or felt remotely happy—since I could remember. “We need to have a Picknick tomorrow! Tiergarten park! Everyone come! Bring your friends!”

  In the end, only a handful of the class showed up—Mu-Yuan had a full weekend of ironing her husband’s ties, Katja was too busy studying for her language exam, and Goran, thank goodness, had skipped class on the day we planned the outing and didn’t know about it. In the end, it was just Zoë the French Swiss, the Americans, Hsu the grammatically perfect slow talker, and me, feasting on Butterbrot and washing it down with room-temperature champagne. In honor of the warm day, I was wearing a backless cotton halter dress from Anthropologie, in a yellow-and-green floral print that was supposed to evoke 1970s glam but instead made me look like I had a starter case of hepatitis B. Few noticed the sallow tinge to my complexion, however, because everybody was looking at my boobs: the dress had a neckline that plunged halfway down my rib cage. It felt like a bit of a shame to be wasting it on Oberstufe—especially when Hsu so clearly disapproved: “If your skin is so pale and sensitive,” he said in his measured, grammar-translation-method diction, “why do you wear so little clothing?” I took a little pleasure in noting that Herr Perfektes-Deutsch used the phrase so wenig Kleider, a literalism no German would employ in that context, because it evokes a mental picture of someone draping multiple garments all over her and then removing all but a few of them. (A German would technically say so little, but Germans would never say that to begin with, because they think swimsuits are for prudes, for chrissake.) Just as I was about to tell Hsu I had on plenty of SPF 50, he got a text and jumped up.

  “I’m going to get my friend from the S-Bahn station,” he said.

  Huh, I thought. Hsu has a friend. Must be French or Taiwanese, because otherwise how could they ever have a conversation? To my immense surprise, fifteen minutes later he returned with an actual German dude, who introduced himself as Matthias and explained that he enjoyed meeting international students. Matthias was, we learned, in a band—with a name in nonsense-English, Assimilated Funk. He was twenty-four and in the final semester of an eighteen-month Ausbildung, or professional school, an alternative (or sometimes a supplement) to university that trains Germans for a specific vocation. This is because almost all jobs in Germany require some sort of certification. You shop for shoes in Germany, and the person who gets your size and m
akes officious recommendations about your foot shape is not some Al Bundy schmoe, but rather a graduate of an official certificate program in footwear retail. Matthias was training in Werbeverkauf, or ad sales. I made the silly mistake of asking what he was going to do when he was finished with his studies, and he looked at me like I didn’t know how words worked and said: “Ich werde Werbekaufmann.” (I’ll work in ad sales.)

  “Sorry,” I said. “In my country, the mythos is that philosophy dropouts become multibillionaire CEOs, and people with eighth-grade educations grow real-estate empires.” (Oberstufe was working really well. Apparently all it took to get better at German was, you know, to study German a lot. Phantastisch.)

  “I thought everybody in America drove a package truck,” Matthias said.

  “A what?”

  “A package truck. You know, like on The King of Queens.”

  I told Matthias that despite my job as a professionelle Fernsehzuschauerin (professional TV watcher), I had only seen a few episodes of The King of Queens and I didn’t like it.

  “Echt?” he said in disbelief. “It’s the funniest show in the world.” Germans love terrible American television for reasons I will never understand (I, in turn, love terrible German television), so this was not the deal-breaker it would have been on domestic soil. As the sun finally began to set, Matthias suggested we all meet up in a few hours out at Krumme Lanke, which sounds like “crummy lake,” but it is actually a quite lovely place to go, down in the leafy southwestern suburb of Dahlem. “I can bring my guitar and some candles, and we can sing and hang out.” This was exactly the kind of weird adventure I’d been expecting since I walked off the plane, and if I had to withstand some German-language recounting of Kevin James jokes, so be it.

  Three hours later, I alighted at the Krumme Lanke station, the end of the U1 line that I used to ride to my Bertolt Brecht seminar. I expected to see the same ragtag crowd of internationals as before, but instead it was just Matthias. “Nobody else is coming,” he explained. He was, as promised, carrying his guitar and three small tea lights. I had, as promised, brought a bottle of red wine and an opener. We were, I realized with what turned out to be a very slow mind, on a date. Berlin was nearly unrecognizable to me now, full of expensive boutiques and nightclubs with international reputations that wouldn’t let someone like me in. (Not that I was a fan of German techno, which sounds like a Volkswagen and a record player challenging each other to a duel, or dancing to German techno, which primarily involves jumping up and down in one place.) I was older, too, no longer able to glom onto amorphous groups of students up to no good. But I was pleased to see that fortunes there could still turn in forty-five seconds, that a picnic with a bunch of dorks could morph into a romantic lakeside date with no warning. What’s better, I could do the whole thing in German, which would be great practice. The competitiveness of my early youth had recently resurfaced, and since I had recently discovered that German wasn’t actually that hard to learn if only one actually spent any time studying, I’d shot to the top of Oberstufe. This also had the pleasant side effect of unnerving Goran and Hsu, who were used to being the best at everything and, at least in Goran’s case, distraught to be schooled by a girl. Who knew that the key to linguistic and academic success was, you know, effort? And now here I was on some top-notch cultural immersion, if I did say so myself.

  Except then, as we settled in by the lake and Matthias asked me exactly why breaking up with my boyfriend had made me so sad, before I could answer, he said, in English: “You know what? Let’s switch. I find it much easier to speak about my emotions in English.”

  God dammit. Turns out he’d spent a year of high school in Ireland and spoke English as well as I did. I wanted to say that I’d rather not speak about emotions if it was going to interfere with my linguistic process. But that sentence had some tricky subjunctive constructions I wanted to get just right—plus I had to search a second for the word for “progress,” Fortschritt, literally “a step forward”—and I accidentally created about four seconds of awkward silence. Matthias took this as his cue to make a move, and asked, in English, if he could kiss me. I hesitated, but only for an instant. I knew that nothing about this evening would really take away any of my pain, my loneliness, my insecurity. But, I had also never had relations on the banks of a lake by candlelight before—and if I did, its adventure-cache would finally begin to make up for all the previous evenings spent watching German Phoebe sing “Schmuddelkatz.”

  “How much longer are you going to be here?” Matthias asked later, as we rode the night bus back to Schöneberg and I inspected the abrasions on my knees caused by the rough sand.

  “About two weeks,” I said.

  That was his German way of informing me that we would be dating for those two weeks. He introduced me to all of his friends and took me to hang out at a sort of unstaffed informal club near the FU, where I learned to play a board game called Therapy, which plays off the general German disapproval of the mental health profession and those who partake in its practitioners.

  Matthias’s friends were nice enough, with the exception of Hanno, who, when he learned that I was about to start a doctorate and enjoyed the fiction of Franz Kafka and the political theory of Walter Benjamin, just kept shaking his head and going “ACH DU SCHEISSE!” When it was my turn to read off one of the questions in Therapy, he would mimic my slight accent until whatever confidence Oberstufe had bestowed was duly obliterated. Scheiße indeed.

  There were a lot of downsides to my two-week relationship with Matthias. First of all, he was the opposite of Johannes and Paul—and for that matter, any German I had ever met—when it came to his cigarettes. I was under the impression that German smokers offered cigarettes to other smokers no matter what the pretense, but after I’d bummed about three, he turned to me and said, in poorly ordered English that was out of character: “Not to be an asshole, but, maybe you buy also cigarettes?” And he, like many twenty-four-year-old Germans, still lived with his parents. This meant that if I ever wanted to have relations with him indoors, I would have to do so in his childhood twin bed. Whereas the act of bringing home a sex-companion about whom one is decidedly unserious, and parading her in front of one’s parents, is the subject of many a prudish American advice column, adult Germans who live with their parents often enjoy a relationship more akin to flatmates (except the parents still pay for all the rent and the food, and, in Matthias’s case, still cleaned and ironed his underwear).

  That is why, on my penultimate morning in Berlin, as I tiptoed petrified into Matthias’s living room, he couldn’t at all see what the big deal was.

  “It’s just my mum,” he scoffed in English. “She’s nice.”

  I tried to take it as yet another opportunity to interact Germanically with Germans in their natural milieu. Germans are not uptight Puritans about sex. German TV plays soft-core porn after 10:00 P.M.! Germans expect their adult children to be adults. This is acceptable. Here goes. Mattias’s Mutti, on the other hand, had apparently not been told anything about me except that I was American. So when I shuffled into her dining room and mustered up my least-awkward “Morgen,” she replied at about ninety-billion decibels and a speed slower than my classmate Hsu.

  “GUTEN MORGEN!!!” She pointed outside to the sky, so that I could figure out, from its morningness, what she meant.

  “Hallo,” I answered, “ich bin die Rebecca.” This is the excellent way that Germans casually introduce themselves, because it contains the definite article. “I am THE Rebecca,” as if I am the only one. All foreigners immediately start doing this all the time as soon as they learn how, because everyone wants to be THE only one of themselves, and also everyone wants to signal to their interlocutor that they are no Mein Bett ist geschlossen–mumbling beginners. I might not be a native speaker—as Matthias’s dick friend Hanno never stopped pointing out—but I was fluent in German, goddammit, and I would have the friendly German Frühstück (breakfast; literally, “early piece”) that I’d sq
uandered back at the Herrmanns’, and if I had to do it with a King of Queens fan to accomplish this, so be it, goddammit.

  “OH!!!” Matthias’s mother answered, again with the face-splitting grin of the person who conflates being foreign with possessing a severe intellectual hindrance. “SPRICHST DU ETWAS DEUTSCH?!?!”

  “Ach, Mama,” Matthias said sheepishly. “She studies Germanistik; of course she speaks German.”

  “Ich spreche eigentlich ziemlich fließend Deutsch,” I said, but with the most confidence I could muster. (“I actually speak fairly fluent German.”)

  “SURE YOU DO, DEAR!” she replied. “WE HAVE BREAKFAST IN THE OTHER ROOM FOR YOU! FRÜHSTÜCK? DO YOU KNOW WHAT ‘FRÜHSTÜCK’ MEANS?”

  The good news, I realized as I sipped Matthias’s mom’s fortuitously strong coffee and affixed cheese to my Brötchen with a healthy slathering of butter, was that I had at long last managed to chip away just slightly at my Love Grief. This would have made the trip to Berlin a rousing success, if only I were about to go for a Ph.D. in being on the rebound. But alas, the linguistic confidence for which I had just paid a healthy sum still eluded me, and I returned to the U.S., left New York, moved—at the age of twenty-eight—back in with my parents for the summer, and moped about Eugene, fairly sure that I was about to begin doctoral-level study in a language in which nobody would believe I knew the word for “breakfast.”