Sharon Black
Jetlag
In Berlin we eat Käsespätzle the first night. I have to pick the
bacon bits
out of mine. I’m actually a vegetarian, but this was the only thing
on the
menu that didn’t come with a still-kicking hoof. Mona takes a bite of
hers
and says she doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “It’s
just
cheesy noodles,” she says. She looks both disappointed and relieved.
When I
ask her what she expected, she shrugs and says she doesn’t know. Then
she
says, “Something more German-ee, you know. Something with more
oom-pa-pa.”
Mona is here to forget; her needs are our main concern this week,
numero
uno, our erste Priorität. Me, I’m just footing the bill. I came into
my
inheritance recently, and Mona’s my oldest friend. Besides, I’ve
always
wanted to come back; I lived here once, a long time ago.
We dab at the grease that has collected around the corners of our
mouths -- our
Mundwinkel, if you will. (German can be so charming, so on the nose.) I
wave
at our server and rub my thumb against the inside of my fingers to
indicate
that we would like to pay. It’s the daily vocabulary that keeps
slipping my
mind. Check, please? Anyone? I suppress the urge to recite a bit of
Hofmannsthal just to show that I still can. Anything to foster the
illusion.
The fact that Mona has never been out of the country is evident in the
little things, like the way she rubs her tummy at our server to
communicate
that the meal was to her liking. His expression is sympathetic as he
counts
out my change and I tip him well.
Once outside, Mona raises her arms high above her head and does a
little
twirl as we stand on the sidewalk looking out over the Spree.
“Whoopee!” she
cries. I glance around to see how many people might have caught that. I
was
afraid something like this might happen this week, that Mona would
experience a kind of breaking out (or freaking out); she has been shut
up
for so long. Trying to please a man can really consume one’s life.
I lean over the metal railing and watch this pretty city’s reflection
flicker on the river’s slowly moving waters and I wonder what will
become of
us both. Then I wonder what will become of the world. And then I am
tired
and tug at Mona’s elbow until she follows me dutifully across the
road and
up the stairs to the waiting S-Bahn, which eventually, with stops and
starts, carries us to the safety of our hotel room.
The year I lived in Berlin I did a lot of this and that, and I did a
lot of
nothing. My parents, relieved and proud as peaches, called me upon
arrival
to sing my praises some more. Finally! Someone snubbing the family
tradition!
“Oh, will you look at you,” my mother said. “Just look at you.
How is it? Do
you like it? Do their toilets flush like ours? Does being there give
you the
heebie-jeebies?”
“Pardon?”
“After Edna and Wendell came back, Edna was just exhausted. Wendell
had to
do the milking for a week! She said she hardly slept the whole time
they
were there. Said she kept dreaming she heard jackboots coming down the
hall.
But, well. That was twenty years ago.” Jackboots. Christ.
“You just get that paper done,” my dad said, prudently.
I did a lot of this and that, and I did a lot of nothing. Actually, the
only
nothing I did was what I was supposed to be doing, which was “that
paper,”
researching for my dissertation: Valeska Gert and Expressionist
Aesthetics:
Materiality and the Grotesque. I still like the title; I’d like to
think
it’s catchy, maybe even a bit startling, like Valeska herself. The
actual
dissertation is in a drawer somewhere, beneath worn winter mittens and
a
couple of old T-shirts, unfinished. That year the DAAD did, however,
provide
me with ample scholarship funds with which to do a lot of everything
else.
And it’s not like I didn’t learn anything -- I know to put my knife
and fork
jointly to the right side of my plate when satisfied; I know to bring a
purse and not a rucksack to the theater; I know how to slowly shave
Tête de
Moine cheese until it is a placid, perfect blossom; I know there are no
taxis to be had on New Year’s Eve. Indeed, I left this city a much
more
knowledgeable and refined woman, and no one can accuse me of being
ungrateful.
For this reason, I still know my way around, even after all these
years.
It’s like riding a bicycle. I could find my way blindfolded to the
Berliner
Ensemble or the Deutsches Theater. I know that it’s this time of
year -- early
fall -- when spiders overrun the metal railings of the bridges leading
to both.
The Schaubühne is the closest theater to our hotel on Kurfürstendamm,
so I
reserved tickets over the Internet six weeks ago. I do like my ducks in
a
row. This Wednesday night we will be seeing Chekhov’s The Seagull.
Granted,
it’s not a real pick-me-upper, but it is a rather moving tale of
people who
have resigned themselves to unhappiness, yet cling precariously to
hope. I
thought it fitting. I gave Mona a copy of the English text to read
beforehand so that she can better follow along when the time comes.
It’s the
thought that counts. Actually, I’m banking on her dozing off long
before
Konstantin’s suicide in the final act. I don’t need her getting any
ideas.
I also wrote out a list of everyday vocabulary for her to learn, but
she
hasn’t made it past Bitte and Danke, which she pronounces as if it
were
donkey. For the most part, I do the talking, or try. On our first day
out I
feel like a squeaky chain in need of a good oiling. I forget the
simplest
things. I ask for the German equivalents of thingamabobs and
doohickeys, I
do a lot of pointing and ecstatic nodding. I ask myself what I actually
did
all those years I claimed to be studying German. Well, there was Ulf,
and
Johannes, and Robert, and the somber plays and flashy dinners and all
the
other things that came with them. And these things certainly do take
time.
And Sam, of course, can’t forget Sam, with his polished nails and
practiced
walk. Sam, who took me on a nippy midnight outing through the
snow-covered
grasses of Tiergarten and beyond. Ha-ppy New Year! Although,
bitteschön, in
all fairness, Sam himself took hardly any time at all; rather it was
what he
left behind that did it, that took up the rest of my life, namely my
daughter, Lori, who is now making college plans herself. Michigan
State?
Chicago? She’s still up in the air. My, but time does fly. I tell
Mona we’ll
have to be sure to call our kids sometime this afternoon before they
all
leave for school. They are seven hours behind us. I am seven hours
older now
than I would be at home. I wonder if older always means wiser.
We stand at a standing-only café, our cups of coffee are tiny and soon
empty. I don’t admit to as much, but I’m still reeling from the
flight; it’s
as if a major portion of myself is still dozing peacefully with our
kids and
cows back home. I give my head a swift shake and blink twice. The
majority
of the powdered sugar from Mona’s Berliner has made its way not into
her
mouth but onto her bosom, which acts as a large, wide shelf. It has
been
known to catch peas. Her eyes follow mine and she chuckles, swatting at
her
t-shirt and jiggling her heavy self clean. “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
she
exclaims, only her version is such that I doubt even the swiftest mind
could
make the connection to J.F.K.
“You certainly are,” I say, with as much enthusiasm as I can
muster. I am,
after all, here to support and encourage, to make up for all those
years in
between. I raise my empty cup to her. “Here’s to a week of freedom,
to a new
you.” When she smiles there is jelly-filling on her teeth.
Mona didn’t mean to get religious on us, at least this is how I see
it. It
just kind of happened, as things do. She had the one baby, then the
other,
and then another. She gained weight, got depressed, the typical
downhill
slope. Jesus just happened to be the one to catch her, which was nice
of
him, I suppose, seeing as I wasn’t being much of a friend at the
time. Lori
was already in grade school by then; I had the diaper-years behind me.
Sometimes I even screened my calls.
Mona says she plans on eating a Berliner every day that we’re here,
maybe
two. I tell her to knock herself out. Then I pay for both of us and
haul her
off to the Pergamon Museum where I can continue to display my
erudition. I’d
like to think all those student loans went to some good.
“This is the Hellenistic Pergamon Altar,” I say, proudly, as if I
built it
myself. “It dates from 180 to 160 BC.” Mona is fiddling with her
headset.
When she finds the English station her face lights up. “Houston, we
are
clear for take off,” she says, and raises her arm in a salute
reminiscent of
days best not mentioned here. My smile is thin and stretched tight and
I
can’t help it. And it’s not just out of discomfiture. I am also
slightly
piqued that Mona prefers a headset to me. I move forward, set on acting
my
age. I soon find myself, however, dropping phrases here and there as we
go,
ones which I know will be of special interest to her. At the Market
Gate of
Miletus, for instance, I pluck her left earpiece away from her head
long
enough to say, shout, “120 AD. Some say the Apostle Paul once passed
through
this gate.” Mona’s eyes widen. “Holy Moly!” she hollers. A few
heads turn. I
motion for her to adjust the volume on her headset before talking. She
grins
and complies. “And this,” I say as we enter the adjoining room that
contains
the Babylonian Processional Street which leads to the Gate of Ishtar,
“dates
back from the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, about 605 to 562 BC.”
About.
Mona’s eyes are saucers, her mouth a little O. “Nebuchadnezzar?”
she
whispers, breathily, as if the man himself might be standing right
behind
her. “You mean Daniel saw this very gate?” She looks as though she
might
faint. I run a fingertip along the cerulean and ochre tiles.
“Maybe,” I say,
shrug, and walk on. Mona, too, runs a hand along the tiles, but a guard
spots her and asks her to stop. She folds her arms around her generous
chest, looking somewhat like a scolded child. After the guard has
passed out
of the room, she whispers, even more softly, as though she’s not
allowed to
speak either, “This is incredible, I just touched the same wall as
Daniel.
It must be a sign.” I am unprepared for this so I ask her, also
quietly,
what on earth she’s talking about.
“That I’m in God’s will.” Her smile is anxiously convinced.
“You know, I
just need to persevere, like all those love-sick Russians in that
seagull
story you gave me. And, well, the Apostle Paul bit, that’s just the
icing on
the cake, the extra little oomph.” She makes a fist, bends her elbow
and
swings her arm heartily, like the no nonsense Midwesterner that she is.
“Right,” I say, and hastily lead the way downstairs to the waiting
Assyrians.
Tucholsky wrote a review of Valeska Gert’s dance: he said she
“danced
Wedekind.” Her defiant spirit brought her fame, which peaked during
the
Weimar Republic, as did her Jewishness, and her exile during the war.
She
was avant-garde, a trouble-maker. She wrote four different
autobiographical
accounts of her own life. Unfortunately, for my graduate research this
was
about all I had to go on; in a way she was still too fresh, too near.
Sufficient time had not yet lapsed in which scholars could publish the
words
and ideas which I, in turn, could cut, paste, rearrange, pass off as my
own.
The idea was all wrong to begin with. Or, perhaps it was a good idea
and I
was merely the wrong person for the job. I never did have the gumption
it
required to be the first one to really dig up the goods. All the same,
it’s
a pity.
On days when I’m feeling generous towards others, my daughter in
particular,
and even Sam-the-Louse, I say this is why I never finished. I tell
myself
and others that I was never cut out for the world of academia anyway.
Me, a
professor. What a lark! Stick to things you know, stick to cows. Other
times
though, on tightfisted, regretful days, I wonder how I could have been
so
stupid, which is what my parents said, repeatedly, when I came home
early
and had to tell them what (or rather who) had become of my
long-anticipated
year abroad. And they kept it up, too, their merciless finger pointing,
right on through until they went into the ground. They never were big
on
expanding their vocabularies, only on repetition, as if their one
accusation
was so original it deserved constant airing: stupid, stupid, stupid.
“So when are we gonna go shopping?” Mona asks, massaging her right
calf. We
are sitting in snug wicker chairs that hug our bottoms on the sidewalk
outside a café on Unter den Linden. With our backs to the restaurant,
we
have been watching and enjoying the hurly-burly typical of this
legendary
street. I’m glad I brought Mona to Berlin now, while the air is still
warm
and the lindens are at their best. They’re such disappointing trees
in the
late autumn: never quite orange enough, annually changing into
something
just short of spectacular. I inhale deeply and quietly survey my
surroundings. Much has changed in the years since I was here. The
trendy
places, for example, are all now in what was the East, while poor
Charlottenburg has lost its flare entirely. The Tränenpalast is no
longer a
notoriously gut wrenching border-crossing but a tourist hotspot. Talk
about
your voyeurism, Sam once said, presciently it now seems. The palace of
tears. And lo and behold here I now sit, without a passport, without a
purpose, on this street, a mere kilometer from the gate in the Wall
that
undid a country. Of course I’m not alone, Mona and I are two of
countless
porky tourists. In truth, I felt Mona would be more comfortable here;
not to
mention that I am more comfortable with Mona, here, in what has become
Little Touristville. “I think I’m getting shin splints,” she
says, still
rubbing her calf.
“Wrong side,” I tell her, and order another espresso. Jetlag is
giving me
more trouble than I expected.
“Well, you’re not the youngest anymore, you know,” Mona says,
when I mention
this.
“Yes, I know, thank you.”
She places the small, round cookie that came with her coffee in the
palm of
her hand and whacks the back of it so that the cookie flies high into
the
air. She has to dart her open mouth around quickly to catch it, but she
manages. She munches then, grinning, pleased with herself. “I’ve
always
wanted to do that,” she declares. “And now I’ve done it.”
“So you have,” I say, and sigh, squinting to penetrate this onerous
fog
plaguing my mind and body, straining for the moment to see only the
bottle-green leaves that will soon be gone, before I close my eyes.
Later, we have to interrupt our shopping to find a payphone from which
to
call our children, which proves to be more difficult than expected in
this
cellular phone hell. Lori is not exactly delighted to hear my voice at
seven
in the morning, but she feigns interest in my trip and tells me that
she got
an A+ on her physics test from last week.
“Physics!” I exclaim. “Your ticket out! My word, they really must
have -- ”
“Switched me at the hospital, I know, I know,” she says swallowing
a yawn
and it strikes me that I myself could afford to expand my vocabulary.
Mona’s children tell her that Daddy took them swimming and out to
Chuck E.
Cheese. She looks somewhat stricken when she hangs up. “And she went
with
them,” she tells me, dazed, plopping herself down on the edge of the
sidewalk. A bicyclist has to swerve to miss her.
“Who went where?”
“Cheryl, I think she went, too. They didn’t mention her name, but
they kept
saying them when they were talking about Don, not him.” She puts her
head
between her knees and takes deep, measured breaths. “Oh, Lord, oh
Lord,” she
murmurs.
Cheryl, of course, is Don’s secretary. Or was. It’s all a bit too
hackneyed
for my taste, but there you go. What did it, what finally put the nail
in
their coffin, was Mona’s sudden conviction that she should refrain
from
sexual intercourse for a time. She claims it was the Apostle Paul’s
idea,
but I did some reading around in the Bible and can’t say I quite
follow. Oh,
but isn’t hindsight always twenty-twenty. I suggest we continue our
shopping
tomorrow and go back to the hotel for a little afternoon nap: a
Nickerchen. (The precision!)
“We can go out for a nice relaxing dinner tonight,” I tell her,
“after some
R&R, after we get ourselves together.”
Mona sits up and exhales long and purposefully through perfectly
rounded
lips. If I didn’t know better, I would think she’s been learning
yoga on the
side. “Yes,” she says, “just gotta get myself together. No use
crying over
spilt milk.” Truly fitting idioms have never been her strength.
For dinner Mona says she would prefer something familiar tonight,
something
she knows how to order, and eat. She says she’s had enough surprises
for one
day. I want to say that Cheryl isn’t really a big surprise, but
stating the
obvious is rarely helpful. We find a quaint little Italian restaurant
near
Savigny Platz which is welcoming and white-tableclothed. I order a
glass of
Pinot Grigio, then look at Mona and raise my eyebrows to see what
she’ll be
having. “A Coke,” she says, nodding to the waiter and myself, “a
big one.”
She talks as if she’s ordering a whisky, bourbon on the rocks,
anything to
get her through the night. She picks up the outer fork next to her
plate and
twirls it in her hand. “For the salad, eh?” She winks and smiles a
proud
little smile.
“Right on the money,” I say and take a long sip of wine. I, too,
will need
to get through this night.
“So, what are we gonna do tomorrow? Go see the White House?”
“You mean the Reichstag?” I pronounce it slowly and say yes, we can
if she
wants. She shrugs. “Sure, I’ve heard I need to see it as long as
I’m here.”
“Oh, yes, you heard right.”
Dinner arrives on large plates, making our food appear small and
dainty.
When I use my spoon to twist my noodles onto my fork Mona says,
“Whoa,
neat!” and follows suit, awkwardly at first, but then she gets the
hang of
it and off she goes. After what seems like moments our elegant meals
are
gone and we are left staring hungrily at the remaining streaks of white
sauce on our plates. I lean over and whisper that this is good for our
figures. Mona rolls her eyes and tells me to ask about dessert.
I order a second glass of wine with my cheesecake and she makes a face.
“Oh,
gag,” she says, “that goes together?” I smile and proceed to eat
my dessert
in what I now feel to be a justified silence. When she has finished her
chocolate mousse, she pushes her plate back and says, “You know,
I’ve been
doing some thinking, about Jesus.”
Oh, no. I’m really not in the mood for The Talk right now. Besides, I
did
the whole bow-my-head-close-my-eyes bit once already, six years ago,
just to
make her happy. I thought she would quit harping, I thought I was
saved.
Silly me. I realized then that I had only succeeded in opening an
extremely
large can of worms. After salvation comes discipleship, I now know.
Discipleship is another word for learning how to walk the walk. I take
a few
sips of wine to ready myself.
“It’s just, well, I’m kind of tired of him.”
I cough a splash back into my glass. “Who?” I demand.
“Jesus, you know, tired of him, tired of the whole thing. The way
he’s
always right there beside me, hanging on my elbow. The way he always
has to
be a man.”
“Well, wasn’t he a man?” I’m usually more help than this.
“Everyone’s always talking about how happy he makes them, how glad
they are
that he’s with them every day, helping them along, keeping them on
the right
path. I mean, what could be better?” When I don’t respond, she
says, “But I
kind of don’t like him wanting me to need him like that, you know?”
“Not a real healthy relationship maybe?”
“I mean it’s fine once in a while, but he just never lets up.
He’s always
wanting something. I’m always having to do something to make him
happy.”
“Hey,” I say, holding my hands up in surrender, “you’re
preaching to the
choir here.” I cringe then at my own ill-fitting idiom, but she’s
not
listening.
“I think maybe the sex-fast wasn’t such a good idea.”
To this I could say a lot of things, again including the obvious: that
going
from being a fat, depressed housewife to a Jesus-obsessed, sex-fasting
housewife is not usually the way to keep one’s man. But she seems to
have
seen that now, so I just say, “Right.”
I tell her we should get some fresh air before going back to the hotel
for
the night. We head north. From Ernst Reuter Platz I point out the
Siegessäule, the bronze statue of Viktoria just down the road,
standing tall
and glorious in her triumph. Mona shivers in the summer night air and
whispers, “A golden angel,” and for once I let it go.
We continue walking until we come to the Spree. In the middle of a
bridge we
stop and simply watch the water, our reflections flickering on the
water,
debris floating in the water, floating past us, under our bridge and
out the
other side. Mona moves back from the railing and starts looking around
for
something. When I ask, she says, “Pooh Sticks.”
“Pardon?”
“Pooh Sticks, you know, as in Winnie. I thought we could play, but I
can’t
find any sticks.” I tell her this is truly lamentable. “Be right
back,” she
says then, “and you have to be Eeyore ‘cause you’re being such a
puss.”
“A puss?”
“A sourpuss!” she hollers back, chuckling. I watch her elbows and
back end
disappear into the night. I rest my own elbows on the railing and
imagine
what our lives would be like if we were younger, and had more time. Or
if we
could simply go back -- Cut! Take two! -- or if we were taller, or even
just more
agile. If Don could have loved his wife more, if I hadn’t been so
stupid.
“Ha! Found some!”
Mona hands me a moist and wobbly branch, still green where she snapped
it
from the bush down the road. Her stick is much smaller than mine.
“You know
Pooh and your Check guy thought a lot alike.”
“Chekhov?”
“That’s the one. He said the important thing is having the strength
to
endure. ‘One must know to bear one’s cross, and one must have
faith.’”
“You’ve been memorizing Chekhov?”
“Basically, they both said it: endure.”
“Pooh Bear says to endure?”
“Well, not in so many words. He’s more like, ‘Make the best of
it.’ You
know, like that useful pot to put things in. Gotta let bygones be
bygones.”
She smiles at me and I don’t know which one of us she’s talking
about.
We bend over the Spree of my youth and drop our sticks into the
river’s
traveling waters. Soon they are out of sight and we scurry, not unlike
schoolgirls, across the street, in front of an oncoming bus whose
high-strung driver honks and we both cry, “Whew!” when we reach the
other
side. My cheeks feel flushed.
“Hey, you shouldn’t have given me such a big one,” I say.
“It’s not fair, to
you.”
Mona bumps my hip with her more substantial one and gives me a wily
grin.
“You never know,” she says in her singsong voice, “it’s not
always the early
bird who’s getting that worm.”
I shake my head to clear it, but the fog is already lifting as we lean,
side
by side, as far over the edge as we can, waiting, watching for the tips
of
two sticks, watching the water, the city, the passing of time, watching
out
for seagulls, waiting for a sign.
©2007 by Sharon Black
