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    Schadenfreude, a Love Story

    Page 7
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      On my seventh day of school, I came home to find that the dirty clothes in my room had been washed, dried, and folded; the bed had been made (the “correct” way, with the duvet folded sideways); even my Aschenbachian collection of eyeliners and hair dye had been arranged on a vanity tray in an orderly fashion. When I came back downstairs to get a glass of water—straight from the tap, which prompted a gasp and “Aber das ist ungesund!” (“That’s unhealthy!”) from Gisela—Frau Herrmann looked up from scrubbing the kitchen counter and said: “I hope you don’t mind that I straightened up your room. It was a little bit messy in there.”

      “Nein,” I said. “Oder … ja. Nein, kein Problem? Ja, es ist OK?”

      I can’t even do passive-aggressiveness in English, so this was not going to end well. And anyway, instead of taking the hint and cleaning up my act, I took her entry into a room in her own house as a gross violation of my personal space, my Lebensraum, my habitat, the little closet-sized cushion of sovereignty I needed around myself for just a few hours every day, in order to feel safe. Of course I wasn’t about to say that to the Herrmanns—and definitely not with the word Lebensraum, which, like the word Arier (Aryan) or the last names Himmler and Goebbels, had been co-opted by the Nazis enough to taint them during everyday usage (many Germans with those surnames, not to mention You-Know-Who’s, changed them after the war). In the case of Lebensraum—once a rather harmless word popular in the natural and social sciences—Germans started using it around the turn of the twentieth century to describe the way they “needed” to “settle” (i.e., colonize and oppress) some of the surrounding countries in order to “survive” (I’m not sure they knew what that word meant). During the Third Reich, the Nazis invoked the term to justify the annexation of everything they could get their Sieg Heil–ing little paws on, so as to possess enough agricultural riches to create a pastoral idyll for the Übermenschen (another word, courtesy of Nietzsche, that can’t be used without invoking Nazis). Since I possessed neither the chutzpah nor the linguistic facility to discuss the nuances of Lebensraum with Frau Herrmann, I made the other logical choice: I smiled and nodded at her all day long, but started referring to her in my artisanal homemade travel journal as die Drachenfrau (a literal and inappropriate translation of “the Dragon Lady”). And then, rather than be subjected to more mild criticism, I proceeded to shut the entire Herrmann family out, to treat their house like a really inconveniently located hotel. I stopped going home for lunch, or Mittagessen (literally, “midday-food”) which is traditionally Germans’ biggest meal, and which would have been my primary venue for linguistic immersion, a.k.a. magic. I didn’t think I would be missing much, really, since from what I could tell it mostly involved Frau Herrmann immersing potatoes in béchamel sauce and frowning at me while everyone else enjoyed a nice Wurst and I went at the potatoes one-handed with fork only, barbarian that I was. (I’m sure Kelly ate the “correct” way, two-handedly, with a deftly brandished knife and fork.)

      Instead of interacting with actual Germans, the ostensible purpose of this expensive study-abroad program, I hung out on the Prinzipalmarkt every day with Freddie, Anneke, Layla, and Justin, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and coffee. Outside of our strictly delineated German study sessions (during which we admittedly studied pretty hard), we spoke mostly English with each other, and usually had our lunch picnic style in the vicinity of the corpse-baskets, which then bled into hours of “hanging out” at Der bunte Vogel (The Colorful Bird), a pub where we honed our beer-ordering skills and pilfered the colorful cardboard coasters as souvenirs. Anneke downed gargantuan ice-cream sundaes every afternoon and still managed to keep her comely, translucent-skinned bod (obviously something to do with the Dutch metabolism); Layla insisted we all crush our soda cans and hand them to her, so that she could add them to the recycling station at her host family’s house; Justin seemed to survive entirely on Guinness; and Freddie often brought his clarinet to school so that he could half-busk and half-practice in the park on nice days. I was sure this counted as cultural immersion somehow. I mean, Anneke was Dutch, for fuck’s sake, and since we were less than a hundred kilometers from the Netherlands in a town where everyone and his dog had a bicycle, she was pretty much a Münster native.

      I could afford to while away my days in this decadent fashion because for lunch, it cost me less than a dollar to procure a Käsebrötchen (a roll with cheese baked into the top of it) and a warm can of Schwip Schwap, a mixture of cola and orange soda that sounds like it would be vile but is actually delicious. Indeed, I scarcely even noticed the fact that I was missing out on a good 90 percent of what Germans consider acceptable food, so enamored was I of the grocery store and Bäckerei, purveyor of something the Germans referred to with a cognate I knew—Brot—but which relegated everything I had heretofore defined as “bread” to the status of aggressive glue. Germans’ Brot has about as much in common with American bread as the Hubble telescope has with squinting really hard at what you think is Orion. Our bread is so paltry in comparison that Germans call it Toasts, because they know the only way to camouflage its glutinous mediocrity is to char it beyond recognition. I was duly enamored with everything the bakery had on offer, from my daily Käsebrötchen to the dense, tender whole-grain bread, in constant supply at the Herrmanns’, which I would slather in Nutella for my midmorning “break snack” at school, a German tradition I’d adopted with aplomb.

      It was, however, in my failure to adopt other important German cultural mores with similar enthusiasm that my real conflict with the Herrmanns soon emerged. In my defense, much of my failure was rooted not in malice, but in my propensity to smile and nod when spoken to, in all situations—with, perhaps, a wider smile and a more enthusiastic nod for conversations in which my comprehension ranged in the single-digit percentage. It is possible, then, that I was technically told that local land-line calls in Germany are charged by the minute, before I got in the habit of gabbing in English with my friends every night. I’m sure Herr Herrmann watched the time click by and counted it off in antique Nazi Reichsmarks (which he collected and kept in a binder, and showed me one day when he found out I was selectively Jewish). As did he, I’m sure, every time I showered—which, unlike Germans, with their far more reasonable twice-weekly bathing schedules, I did every single morning, oftentimes to such extravagant lengths that I would disrupt the girls’ routines and make them late. (I’m sure Kelly was so naturally floral that she did not need to Bath & Body Works raspberry-cassis-exfoliate to keep herself fresh, and just emerged every morning from her immaculately kept room looking dewy and smelling like fucking gardenias.)

      Again, all of this was an accident. How was I to know that a phone call to Herr Schmidt two houses away cost damn near as much as one to my parents in Oregon? How was I to know that ten minutes of hot running water cost almost as much as the down payment on one of those sleek black Beemers in the driveway? Just because they told me? That would have involved actually admitting that I did not understand what was going on in the house, which would have meant admitting that I didn’t speak German very well, which was in stark contrast to how I was doing in my now-intermediate classes, in which I was still the tippy-top student, which was supposed to count for something. Granted, I had one class where all we did was learn idioms and vernacular phrases—from a book written in 1969, effectively rendering our conversational speech dangerously close to Wild-and-Crazy-Guy levels of cultural soundness. To this day I have never found the occasion to say Ich hab’ mein Schäfchen ins Trockene gebracht, which literally means “I’ve brought my sheep in from the rain.”

      So I smiled and nodded at things I did not understand:

      “Do you [verb preposition noun article preposition article article] Amsterdam [endless compound noun] dirty [verb verb verb]?”

      “[nod].”

      “Did you [verb verb] with the [either two nouns or a compound noun] in the [noun] by the [noun]?”

      “[nod].”

      And in this way, I accidentally ran up a
    massive tab on this unsuspecting family—in possession of such a spectacular abode probably due to their frugality—all while openly resenting what I took more and more to be their intractable, unapologetic Aryanness. I wasted their money, I messed up their rooms, I scoffed at their food—and aside from a few amused family viewings of Die Simpsons dubbed (episodes I knew by heart, so had no trouble following), I scarcely spent two minutes partaking in the hospitality they had specifically signed up to give. And yet, all of this would have been easily dismissed as quirk, had I not also—once again without intent—maybe put their house and all of its trappings in some eensy weensy danger of being robbed.

      It all started because Freddie’s host family left town, and he invited Anneke, Layla, Justin, and me to come hang out at his house. I still don’t know why a bunch of adults of legal drinking age, in a welcoming, inexpensive city with innumerable parks, fountains, cobblestoned pedestrian squares, and reasonably priced purveyors of Eiskaffee (which is not iced coffee, but the far better coffee with a giant scoop of ice cream), felt the need to go “hang out” at some random German house in the suburbs, but there’s no accounting for the caprices of youth. Getting to Freddie’s required me to transfer buses, and it was either in the confusion of the transfer process (again, the “why” of this is lost on me, as German bus timetables and maps are unsurprisingly well-organized), or the distraction of riding with my friends rather than my Walkman and Pulp Fiction soundtrack, that my Stash Sacks purse, made of 100 percent hemp, disappeared from my possession.

      Was it stolen? Did I just up and lose it? I don’t know—but I do know that it wasn’t until I was halfway up Freddie’s walkway that I even noticed it was gone, and that I only ended up getting to “hang out” at his house for forty-five minutes anyway, because then this happened:

      A leathery, middle-aged German woman wearing a visor stormed into the house without knocking and began unleashing a diatribe as she grabbed the nearest window shade, which was up, and yanked it down—with an amount of violence that would have been right at home at Dachau, come to think of it. “[something something something] not [preposition verb verb verb] every day!!!” she screamed. Layla was the only one in our group who could even begin to understand her, and attempted to defend Freddie against whatever window-dressing-related transgression he’d committed: “He didn’t [something something noun preposition verb verb]!” The woman just glared at us and then stomped back out the door.

      “Who the fuck was that?” I asked.

      “The neighbor,” said Freddie, and took a fortifying swig from his room-temperature mineral water.

      “What did you do?” asked Justin, as he removed his putrid baseball cap and gave his head a rub.

      “I have no idea,” Freddie said. “I have got to stop smiling and nodding when my host-mom says shit to me.”

      “I’m guessing it had something to do with the windows,” said Justin.

      “No kidding. I think you guys should probably take off.”

      I no longer had my bus pass, nor any currency or identification, but I could ride the bus anyway, because much of German public transportation operates on the honor system. Riders who already have passes are actually encouraged to board a bus by its rear doors to minimize traffic, and a plainclothes ticket agent (or Kontrolleur) will pop up at random intervals to check passengers’ passes and fine offenders (called, uncomfortably, Schwarzfahrer, or “black riders”). So for a treacherous forty-five minutes, I “rode black” back to the Herrmanns’, where I was to face their wrath. (Let’s just say that Kelly somehow managed to live an entire month in their midst and not lose anything important or jeopardize their very hearth and home, like some sort of magic goddamned sorceress.)

      “Wie war’s?” asked Frau Herrmann, as I scuttled into the kitchen. (How was it?)

      I answered, in my best German, “Nicht so gut. My purse is getting stolen gotten on top of the bus.”

      She set down her tiny glass of room-temperature mineral water in alarm. “Und dein Schlüssel?” She wanted to know if my house key was in there.

      “Ja,” I answered mournfully.

      “Und dein Pass? Für den Autobus?” Yes, my bus pass was in there as well. Upon which was written, in that near-indecipherable curlicue German script, the address of the well-appointed and now fully vulnerable Lebensraum of the Herrmanns. Frau Herrmann was distraught all right, but not about my lost eighty deutsche marks, or the Oregon driver’s license that still had a picture of me as a high-school junior, or my Stash Sack, which I am pretty sure was limited edition. She wasn’t upset for me—in a great exercise on German dative prepositions, she was sehr, sehr böse mit mir, with me, given that I had just imperiled the swimming pool, sauna, wet bar, and creepy antique Nazi money collection. She called me every compound word beginning with dumm in my compact German-to-English dictionary, and then a few new ones. Mercifully, after a hastily convened family summit (“[something something something] done [verb adverb preposition verb verb] so stupid [adverb adjective] and dangerous!” “But [something something verb verb] not [something]!”), it was determined that the Herrmanns would not need to change their locks, as they lived so far out in the boonies, and in such a quiet and uptight neighborhood, that anyone up to no good would be immediately recognizable.

      No one ended up robbing them. In fact, the only real result of the kerfuffle was that I fully (and understandably) lost my key privileges, and thus, for the remaining days of my stay, I was forced to buzz myself into the house every time I came home. This was awkward, because although I had no curfew, the buzzer went directly to an intercom in the elder Herrmanns’ boudoir, meaning that for several nights in a row, in order to be let back into the house I’d put in danger, I had “no choice” but to rouse from slumber the very family who continued to house me, despite my acting with all of the consideration and un-Kelly-like foresight of an active heroin addict.

      Eventually Christoph, in a rare cameo, showed me where they stashed their hidden key, and all was right with the world once again—until, that is, I was given the assignment to interview the Herrmanns about something interesting having to do with Germany, and without the slightest bit of hesitation (indeed, with more than a slight bit of sanctimony), I chose the Holocaust. To my selectively Jewish self, the Germanness of a person, whether one wanted to be born that way or not, was an immediate call for a lifetime of somber self-reflection, of grave shared responsibility, of Gewissensbiss, remorse, the constant “bite” of one’s conscience, of Schuldbewusstsein, the awareness of one’s guilt, of a debt (Schuld means both) that can never be paid. The distance of several generations from the personages and actions of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (or NSDAP, the preferred German shorthand) was no excuse. The fact that at the time considerably more self-avowed neo-Nazis lived in the U.S. state of Idaho than in all of Germany meant nothing. As far as I was concerned, my very presence in the Fatherland as a selective Jew was both a gift to the Volk and a stubborn reminder of my people’s refusal to be exterminated in our entirety.

      So when it came time to sit down and interview the Herrmann daughters, I considered myself a linguistically challenged hybrid of Edward R. Murrow and the Nürnberg interrogators, and my merciless albeit low-syllabic questions took no prisoners—unlike the Herrmanns’ relatives in 1942, in case they forgot for a second, vielen Dank. (Or, for that matter, the Nürnberg interrogators, but this was not a time to think my metaphors all the way through.)

      “Do you learn about the Holocaust at school?” I asked Lisette as she yanked her hair into a punishingly tight bun, then resumed scrubbing down the kitchen counter.

      “Ja klar,” she said. “Von Anfang bis Ende.” From beginning to end.

      “Ende,” I said. Interesting. Interesting.

      “How do you feel about it?”

      “Uh,” said Lisette. “It was bad. It was really, extremely bad. Obviously.”

      “Do you know any Jewish people now?” I asked Gisela.

      “Nur dich,” she sa
    id, and then took a slug of room-temperature mineral water straight from the bottle. “Just you.”

      “Just me,” I repeated, scribbling it down dutifully, giving her my best loaded look. Check and mate, Herrmanns.

      I may have committed my share of minor infractions in their house, but fuck if I wasn’t going to remind them that they were almost certainly the direct descendants of people who had either passively or actively participated in the genocide of the tribe with which I selectively identified when, for example, reminding them of their cultural debt to my people made my behavior as a houseguest appear briefly above reproach. Suddenly snubbing your midday soup and ringing that buzzer in the middle of the night doesn’t seem so bad, does it? They didn’t need to know that I hadn’t set foot in a synagogue since 1986.

      In the wake of what I assumed was one of the realest cultural confrontations of the Herrmanns’ lives—which they, undoubtedly, viewed as yet another head-scratcher from their poorly groomed exchange student—I was invited to join them on a daylong excursion to the Longest Coffee Table in the World, a food-and-drinks festival where about nine hundred meters of folding furniture was lined up in a field somewhere, and participants partook in the afternoon ritual of coffee and Apfelkuchen (a moist apple cake) in the out-of-doors, in what was allegedly the largest mass consumption of such on the planet. Accompanying the main event (to which I referred in my journal as “some sort of bizarre Strudelfest”) were various carnival-type booths with raffles and other attractions I did not understand. Indeed, when the Herrmanns invited me to this shindig I had no idea where I was being taken, because they explained:

     


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