But halfway through my first pouty coffee, Paul called Gertrud’s place and instructed me to come by the Loftschloss, drop off as much of my stuff as I could carry, pick up my new keys, and would I please bring the three hundred deutsche marks in cash? Apparently they had all proclaimed me cool enough to live with them based solely upon whatever they had gleaned from ignoring me. This, I would soon learn, was an excellent demonstration of a near-universal national telepathy: Germans are able to gather all pertinent information about each other from glowering silently in each other’s general direction at bars. Somehow at the end of the night a lot of them pair off, then move in together, have kids without being married, take their full year’s parental leaves, and live happily ever after.
“It’s in the second Hinterhof behind the Sanders Tires sign,” said Paul.
Hinterhof literally means “courtyard behind,” and it refers to the building at the rear of the courtyard that almost all German apartment houses have—in many cases, courtyards, plural, as the Loftschloss was technically in the courtyard behind the courtyard behind.
I nervously Guten Tag’d the blue overall-clad auto workers as they very loudly dislodged some hubcaps. I even-more-nervously buzzed the button marked LOFTSCHLOSS 1. ETAGE (in Germany, the ground floor is “floor zero,” which causes some confusion among Americans and not a small amount of yelling from perturbed neighbors). As soon as Paul let me in and I entered the vestibule of my new home for the first time, I was awash in the smell of concrete and plaster and something faintly sweet, which I would soon learn is a smell oddly common in Kreuzberg loft buildings, and which to this day, if I catch a whiff of it, makes me so nostalgic I start reaching for my pack of Lucky Strikes, even though I haven’t smoked in a decade and a half.
The Loftschloss was not, as Gertrud had warned me, one giant room. It was two giant rooms, plus an actual freestanding, wall-enclosed bathroom with its own stand-up shower and central water heating and everything. I’d barely had a chance to peer around the vast, definitely-industrial-looking space—pipes visible everywhere, unfinished walls, and not a residential fixture in sight—before Paul thrust into my hand the most curious set of keys I’d ever seen. There was a regular-sized one for the door of the loft and a bizarre, giant, cartoon-looking thing wider in circumference than a number-two pencil, with no method of affixing it to any sort of chain. This, Paul explained, was for the outer door, whose lock hadn’t been updated since before the war. You operated it by sticking one end of the key into the keyhole, turning it around until it caught, then swinging the door open, walking through, and pulling the key out the other side of the door. You had to unlock the door from the inside to get out, as well as from the outside to get in. This seemed to me rather terrifying, but perhaps just as the Germans assumed nobody would be forgetful enough to lose their coat-check ticket at the club, so did they assume nobody would be careless enough to set a fire.
“The others are all out,” Paul said. He grabbed my suitcase, wheeled it across the industrial carpet, and lifted a thick black curtain that had been suspended on a rod balanced between two giant pipes that ran across the ceiling.
“But what’s this?” I asked. There was an actual bed there, with a white metal frame that looked like life-sized dollhouse furniture.
“Oh, we put it together for you,” said Paul. “That was actually Leonie’s childhood bed in Munich.”
“Look how close it is to the radiator!” I said.
Paul looked concerned. “Are you going to be too hot? We can move you.”
“Nein!” I assured him, and was then left to unpack my Urban Decay nail polishes and traveler’s checks and giant plastic travel speakers alone, before I collapsed for a luxuriant nap, which I took with my bare feet poking out from under the blanket. I awoke to the sound of glasses clinking and the smell of smoke; someone seemed to be having a party at the small round table that sat some nine feet away from my room’s partition. Was I invited by default, just by living in the party room? What if they all ignored me—like, not German-ignored me benignly, but ignored-ignored me meanly? On my first day? I cowered under my covers, thumbing through my copy of The Threepenny Opera. Was the name Mackie Messer supposed to strike fear into my heart? I couldn’t tell. But at least I could put the opening number to the music in my head. I would have no such luck for Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe. Even though the plays required, you know, effort, they were actually pretty interesting. Perhaps I should be too scared to enter my own living room more often, I thought. Eventually, though, my bladder’s demands became unignorable, and I had no choice but to peek my head out from behind my wall-curtain.
“Ach, Rebecca,” said Paul, who was flanked by Johannes and two people I’d never seen before, a beautiful girl with glowing skin and her boyfriend, a genial-looking guy with red hair and a beard. “You’re alive! Komm schon, join us for an amaretto! You’re not the Hausmaus!”
The girl was Anke, the guy Andreas, and they were yet more friends from Chemnitz. Those Ossis were really tight. Paul poured a shot of liquor into what I would later learn was an egg cup, and I pounded it back before I noticed that my companions were sipping theirs daintily—especially Anke, who only had about half a sip’s worth to begin with.
“We’re celebrating,” explained Andreas. “Anke bekommt ein Kind.” This expression, ein Kind bekommen, literally means “to get a child.” From where? I wondered—and then I figured it out. She was pregnant. That must have been why her skin was so luminous. But wasn’t this terrible news, as a pregnancy would be to myself and literally anyone I knew? Weren’t they too young? (They were twenty-four, and they didn’t seem upset.) But she was drinking! Paul watched my eyes rest on Anke’s tiny glass of amaretto before I composed myself and said, “Wow! That’s wonderful! Congratulations!”
“Don’t be such an American,” he said. “A little sip of amaretto is fine.”
I blushed and grabbed a cigarette, then looked at Anke guiltily. “Kein Problem,” she said. I’d just lit up and blown a satisfying cloud into to the sexy darkness of the living room when I heard the door unlatch and then yelling, of which I only understood the phrase es ist zum Kotzen, which literally means “it is to the vomiting,” but is slang for “it’s absolutely sickening.” Paul excused himself and walked across the cavernous room, bare but for the table and my curtained-off corner, to talk to an obviously irate Leonie. All I could make out was “[something something] knew [something something] smoking [something something] living here!”
Leonie, I soon found out, claimed severe allergies to many common irritants, including cigarette smoke (except, funnily enough, when she was out at any bar, Kaffeehaus, or club), which she also happened to loathe (100 percent correctly, of course). But for some reason, in the Loftschloss she’d been outvoted by Paul, Johannes, and now me (implicitly; it was clear that I would not be getting a full Loftschloss vote anytime soon). Thereafter, despite her vomit-related protestations, a cloud of airborne nicotine hovered at all times near our twelve-foot ceilings. The smoke snuck into the far corners of the oddly sunny “west wing” (Westflügel), which was currently one massive Pergo-floored room, but would soon house all five of the other Loftschlossers in quasi-separate dwellings they built themselves. It permeated the dark-blue industrial carpeting that covered the “east wing” (Ostflügel), the half of the loft designated as the living room, and peeked beyond the thick black fabric that served as my wall.
That first night in the Castle, after what sounded to me like a German Edward Albee play, Leonie and Paul seemed to reconcile (the détente involved “[something something] window [something]”), and Andreas, Anke, and their tipsy fetus were loosed into the Berlin night, with assistance from Paul and his giant cartoon key. I crawled back into my toasty corner and smiled myself to sleep at how quickly your life can change, if you just follow the right jean jackets through the streets in the middle of the night. I was going to be so cool for living there.
The next morning, however, was no time
to be cool. It was, instead, time for manual labor, which I quickly realized came with the terms of my nonexistent lease. The task ahead, of questionable legality, was the self-administered renovation of the west wing, which was to be divided into a kitchen and three bedrooms: one Einzelzimmer (single room) each for Detlef and Rolf—who, I learned near-immediately, were never home—and a massive triple at the wing’s far end, which Johannes, Paul, and Leonie would share. That wing had been in a state of mid-division the very day I moved in, so my true introduction to the loft and its inhabitants—and to speaking German all day long and finally slipping uncomfortably into fluency—coincided with a crash course in interior renovations.
“Rebecca!” Leonie yelled at me from atop a ladder I was steadying, after definitely not enough coffee. “Gib’ mir den Akkubohrer!”
“The what?”
“Akku … bohrer.”
I held up a hammer. “Das?”
“Nein. AKKU. BOHRER.”
I held up a bucket of half-mixed plaster. “Das?”
Finally, Leonie clambered down from the ladder I’d been holding up with not a small amount of brute force, stomped around me, grabbed a cordless screwdriver, muttered “Nutzlos,” and then huffed her way back up the ladder. Akku means “rechargeable battery”; Bohrer means, literally, “screwer” (heh). Not a word that had been on my vocab lists in German 102, 202, or 310, but I certainly knew it now.
Ludwig Wittgenstein uses a construction site as an example of language learning in the Philosophical Investigations—the boss says, “Bring me a board!” and the analphabetic assistant learns what a board is through petty tyranny. Wittgenstein castigates us for believing, wrongly, that this method of language learning (“ostension”) is how we learn our native tongue (because, he points out, in order to understand the gesture for “this is a board,” we have to understand what “this is” means, and thus in order to learn language we already have to understand how language works). But it is, he admits, a working (albeit clunky) method of second language learning, and it is basically how I functioned as building apprentice at the Loftschloss, learning the words for crossbeam, nail gun, and socket wrench by being prompted to do things with them, and then accordingly shamed until I figured out what word I’d never heard before went with what object I had never used before.
As a second-language teacher, Leonie left a bit to be desired.
“Your German, übrigens—which means ‘by the way,’” she told me a few mornings into my apprenticeship (switching into barely accented English for “by the way”), as I held a wall panel in place while she stuffed old copies of the Zweite Hand into it as insulation—“is even worse today than usual.”
Leonie was always, in fact, the first to point out a misconjugated verb, a misgendered noun, a trailing off midsentence because my language was too simple to express a complicated opinion.
“I really can’t emphasize enough,” she continued, “how bad you are at German.” There is a certain kind of German who truly believes she is “helping” the second-language learner by quickly pointing out all of her mistakes before she can finish an utterance—the Sprachpolizei, the language police—and what they really “help” me do is become abjectly terrified to say a single goddamned word, for fear that if I do, it will be my incorrectness, rather than the content of what I am trying to say, that is communicated.
“It doesn’t matter what I say to Leonie,” I said that night to Diane, over one-mark shots of watered-down tequila, at a café about two hundred paces away from the Schloss that ran a special Thursday-night promotion on watered-down tequila. “All she hears—all I feel like anyone hears—is ich bin fremd. I am foreign. Ich bin fremd, ich bin fremd, ich bin fremd.”
“Why don’t you just tell her to Verpiss dich?” she asked. “That means ‘fuck off,’ and she’ll be impressed with your fluency.”
The worst thing about being an intermediate second-language speaker around critical people is that when they criticize your language abilities, it feels like they are also criticizing your intellect; in mocking your clunky construction of a thought, they seem to believe that you really think that way all the time.
“You must have had terrible grades in German class in school,” Leonie said about a week into the renovation, as both of us began smearing plaster on the wall of what would soon be Detlef’s room. “Your teachers must have been very frustrated with you.”
“Well,” I said, glooping my plaster around in a figure-eight, “they didn’t have a chance. I didn’t study German in school.”
“Wie bitte?”
“I did Spanish in school,” I said. “And I was the best in the class, actually.” Finally, a moment when my host country’s tendency toward bluntness would pay off. “I began German at the start of university,” I said. “Which was”—I stopped to count—“two and a half years ago.”
Leonie stopped mid-dunk into the plaster bucket.
“Really?” she asked. “Well, then.”
“For two and a half years,” she said, “you’re actually not so terrible.”
Although that was high praise, my general sensitivity toward criticism of any sort, combined with my specific antipathy toward Leonie herself, meant that I spent my first month in the Loftschloss attempting to prove that I was smart, while simultaneously saying as little as possible. Contrary to the way I have spent every other minute of my life, hours went by when I uttered nothing at all, as I helped convert the loft from an industrial space into a residence—for which, mind you, it was not even close to properly zoned (they had a “corporation” running out of it, something to do with Johannes and Paul’s computer work). As Leonie reminded me every single day, were the landlady, Frau Richter-Schmitt, to do a pop-by unannounced, at no point was I to admit that I lived there and paid rent. This also meant that in no way was I allowed to anmelden, or register my address with the police, which meant, in turn, that I would be unable to obtain the student visa that I had been strictly instructed to get. Not only was I living in an illegal residence, I was also living there illegally. (Back then, however, there was a loophole in the law—as long as you left the Bundesrepublik before your three-month tourist visa ran out, you could just come right back in for another ninety days. All that mattered was that little passport stamp from the Czech Republic or Poland, both of which were a few hours away by train.)
I’m not being fair to Leonie here, by the way. She wasn’t a villain. She actually felt pretty neutral about me, and simply enjoyed giving me grief, which the Germans describe using the unsavory word verarschen, which literally means “to assify (someone).” She was also just really German. (A real Wessi, I would have said about six weeks earlier.) What I would call, in my wishy-washy American way, different preferences for how to do something inconsequential—knotting a scarf, opening a window, plunging a French press, eating cheese—many of the Germans I’ve met would recognize as grievous misdeeds against humanity, requiring the swift performance of a public service, namely both noticing the transgression and bringing it emphatically to my attention. If I protested that their constant criticism (they would call it “help”) hurt my feelings, Germans would respond that the ridiculous delicacy of those feelings is simply another fault that needs to be addressed immediately.
Once when Leonie thought I was either asleep or gone, I overheard her talking to Paul at the table. “Rebecca’s so quiet,” she said.
“No, she’s not,” he said. “She’s just afraid of you.”
“Nonsense,” she said.
I waited until she’d left to tiptoe out into the living room, where I saw that she’d doodled in he
r notebook, in huge letters, the following directive:
ICH VERBIETE REBECCA, MICH ZU FÜRCHTEN.
(I forbid Rebecca to be afraid of me.)
To be fair to all other Germans, plenty of them are substantially more laid-back about the way other people do things than Leonie was, and not just Ossis such as Paul, who was so lackadaisical about washing dishes that he protested when Leonie reminded him to rinse, a rare moment in which she and I were aligned. (“Bah!” he’d said. “It’s not necessary!”) By far the most easygoing resident of the Loftschloss was Johannes, he of the Punky Brewster jeans, busted front tooth, Lucky Strikes, and giant wild mane. He and Leonie were best friends, which only made sense, because they were polar opposites, and if you averaged them out, you got a normal person. He was skinny as a two-by-four and she was curvaceous (though a far, far measure from dick, or “fat,” which is how her flatmates inexplicably described her). His hair inhabited its own zip code; her head was shaved (possibly in homage to Judith Butler). He was vegetarian like me—yes, German vegetarians exist—and she ate like a regular person. And where her personality was as rough as the sandpapery toilet tissue in every restroom in the Federal Republic, his was as soft and gentle as a tiny baby lamb. And that is why, when Leonie declared to the rest of the house that erecting slightly more permanent walls in the corner of the living room, to make the sixth bedroom (my room) into an actual room, was “lowest possible priority”—while looking me right in the eyes—Johannes insisted we raise those walls as soon as Detlef’s plaster was dry. He was protecting me from her. And so obviously I fell in love with him immediately.