“We’re going to the [something something adjective noun], willst du mitkommen?”
And I was so proud of myself for understanding the modal-separable-prefix construction of willst du mitkommen (“do you want to come along?”) that I smiled and nodded and got in the car. Because if there was anything my hard-hitting interview taught me, it was that it’s a good idea to ride to an undisclosed location with a bunch of Germans who vaguely dislike you. For the record, it was a sparklingly blue day, everyone was in a fine mood, and the Apfelkuchen was (as Apfelkuchen usually is) magnificent, the perfect mixture of tender and doughy, not too sweet, not too tart. And the coffee was terrific: smooth, oily, and strong as hell (not unlike, I imagine, the Aryan weightlifting specimens at the 1936 Olympics).
As is common in outdoor food-and-drinks festivals in Germany and Austria, patrons at the Longest Coffee Table in the World paid a five-mark deposit for their ceramic mugs, which was reclaimable upon said mugs’ safe return or, in case the drinker traipsed off with it, effectively cemented a legitimate purchase. Once again, I did not understand any of this at the time, which is why I was both surprised and moved that the Herrmanns pointed to the blue-and-white Kaffeetasse I held in my hands, painted admirably literally with a picture of Germans enjoying coffee and cake and the slogan DIE LÄNGSTE KAFFEETAFEL DER WELT, and proclaimed: “This is for you!”
And they say none of us will ever see any reparations.
Aside from that single day of family cake enjoyment, the primary activity that finally endeared the Herrmanns to me (and vice versa) was my absence. Despite the periodic discomforts of my residency there—no photograph of me, in any state of grooming, would ever grace their mantel—they gamely agreed to look after my gargantuan suitcase and most of my array of questionable synthetic garments during the final month of my trip, which first involved returning to the tour bus—my old friend—for a somber sojourn to the former German Democratic Republic and the Buchenwald concentration camp, and then, at long last, two weeks with my Eurail pass, most of which I planned to spend on a pilgrimage to Prague, where I would walk in Kafka’s shadow and visit his corpse, an activity I assumed he was looking forward to as much as I was.
My final destination was Amsterdam, where I had vague plans to meet up with every friend I knew who was currently backpacking in Europe—plans that somehow came to fruition, despite the fact that nobody involved had a cell phone or even access to e-mail, and that almost everybody involved was spectacularly high for most of the time. While in Amsterdam I also partook in several important cultural expeditions, such as waiting outside—and then being turned away from—the Heineken Brewery (tours booked up months in advance), the Van Gogh Museum (closed on Mondays), and the Anne Frank House (you think you can just walk in to the Anne Frank House without waiting in line for seven hours? Maybe if you’re Gary from Take That you can). The only museum that granted me admittance was the Museum of Sex, which did not have anything in it I could not otherwise learn from one of my many unintentional diversions into the Red Light District, where I was equally shocked to behold both live legal prostitutes and—displayed in the window of a porn shop with all of the pride of a freshly baked baguette—a dildo approximately the size and width of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s arm. I also made the excellent decision to blow the last of my travel budget on a “souvenir” from an establishment called Body Manipulations, by which I mean I had my right nostril pierced by a mild-mannered Dutch lesbian who wielded a hollow needle with the grace of a surgeon.
Thus, it was with pupils fully dilated, a new hole in my face, and my clothes and skin oozing with hashish that, on my penultimate day in Europe, I took the short train ride back across the border into Germany to see the Herrmanns one more time and retrieve the balance of my luggage. And, despite the fact that I was newly punctured, clearly intoxicated, and smelled substantially worse than Bath & Body Works raspberry-cassis exfoliating soap (which had run out shortly before I left their house), the Herrmanns answered the door legitimately amused to see me.
“Hallo, Rebecca!” said Frau Herrmann, working her lips into an actual smile. “You’ve stuck something in your nose!”
She then proceeded to feed me a full Mittagessen, which I scarfed as I fielded as many questions as I could about my trip. Because it turns out that what makes you savor boiled potatoes in white sauce is two weeks spending your food budget on ice cream, beer, and drugs. And the surest remedy for your remedial German is two weeks trying to get by with your absolute jack-diddley-squat zero Czech or Dutch. And the best way to appreciate the uptight strangers who begrudgingly housed you for a month is to spend two weeks sleeping on train-car floors and on the business end of snoring frat guys in grimy twenty-person backpacker hostel rooms. The Herrmanns even schlepped all the way back to the train station in those BMWs with me and my giant suitcase—which was now just a bit heavier due to the addition of my keepsake cup from the Longest Coffee Table on Earth. I brought that mug back with me to college and, for the rest of my student years, assigned it the function of topmost honor in my Lebensraum: my ashtray.
4.
Schriftverkehr
n. correspondence, from text and intercourse.
ex. The opposite of writerly solitude is Schriftverkehr. (And also regular Verkehr.)
In the opening scene of Before Sunrise—the 1995 film that created outsized expectations in a million heady, angst-ridden college students, or at any rate in one, named me—Ethan Hawke’s character Jesse meets Julie Delpy’s character Celine when they overhear an Austrian married couple scream at each other on a train. Neither Jesse nor Celine speaks German, so the particulars of the fight (which is about how the husband thinks the wife is an alcoholic) are lost on them. Still, they bond over the public display of acrimony and strike up a conversation that doesn’t end until twenty-four hours later—when they part ways as the loves of each other’s lives.
I wonder what would have happened to them if, instead, they’d overheard a nineteen-year-old girl with a well-tended head of American hair shriek at a ticket-taker, “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” Maybe they wouldn’t even have noticed each other, because Ethan Hawke would have boinked the do-you-speak-English girl instead. I don’t know. What I do know is that I witnessed such a display on a Prague-bound train at the tail end of my first summer in Europe, which also happened to fall some scant half-year after Before Sunrise caused me to assume my future spouse would manifest himself on one or another form of rail transport. And, flanked by my new study-abroad friends from Münster, Layla, Justin, and Freddie, my instinct was to put on hold my search for a soul mate, roll my cosmopolitan eyes, feel superior, and eavesdrop.
The ticket-taker, who was a Czech woman with a mullet, answered the girl in the way all unamused bemulleted Czech ticket-takers do when asked if they speak English in All-Caps American: “A little bit.” That was, of course, far too modest; she spoke English quite well—had, in fact, just done so to my group five minutes prior—and had likely deployed this answer to avoid prolonging this particular conversation. If you wanted to talk to someone who only spoke a little bit of a language, that would be me; I had attempted to memorize five phrases of Czech, with wildly incorrect pronunciation, from my Let’s Go travel guide. Many well-meaning (but misinformed) friends have assumed at different points in my life that because Germany and the Czech Republic are adjacent, German and Czech are similar, or at any rate speaking German in the Czech Republic will get you understood. What it will get you is well-deserved nasty looks for reminding the Czechs of their hundreds of years of Austrian colonization, which were followed near-on directly by two decades of war and genocidal annexation.
Sure, there was once a thriving Prague German dialect and a substantial German-speaking minority (of which the Kafka family, like most Jews, was a part), but that business was all well in the past by the time I boarded the train during this particular summer, practicing those five Czech phrases with unstartling ineptitude, given that Czech, to the untrained Anglophone ear,
is about as intuitive as dolphin noises. But still, the simple fact that I was trying at all—that I had wished the self-same questionably coiffed conductor a dobrý den and muttered děkuje (or something sort of like it) in thanks after she checked my ticket—made me, I hoped, a different caliber of traveler than that girl at the other end of the car, who I surmised must have learned the All-Caps technique from her parents condescending to their household employees.
“HOW LONG TO PRAGUE?” said the girl, who had not taken the hint that the conductor didn’t want to hang out.
“I’m sorry?”
The girl pointed theatrically to her watch. “HOW MANY HOURS UNTIL WE GET TO PRAGUE?”
We were about eighty kilometers away, and had in fact just crossed the Czech border, enduring the minor excitement of passport control in the days before the European Union, by which I mean fifteen stern-looking Czech police stormed the train (also with mullets, possibly the new country’s national haircut). They’d sternly checked our passports, then bestowed them with stern stamps full of strange words with too many consonants and accents on letters I didn’t know could have them. To answer the girl’s question, it took about an hour to travel eighty kilometers by rail, but on that day, the train was subject to a fifteen-minute delay, on account of the fact that Ms. How Many Hours and her colleagues attempted to present the conductor with Eurail passes, which were not valid in the Czech Republic in 1995. The train squealed to a halt, the girls surrounded in an instant by the stern-looking border cops and three more conductors. Now this was worth at least a quick scene in the melancholy, atmospheric Linklater rip-off movie I had decided to shoot in my head for the duration of my train travels. Was there an impishly handsome man-boy reading Klaus Kinski’s autobiography anywhere on that car, perchance?
I craned my neck as How Many Hours and her friends pooled their cash to see if they had enough money to buy Czech Railways tickets for those final eighty kilometers (I’d purchased a thirty-nine-dollar “Prague Excursion” add-on to my own Eurail pass, which was, given the Czech Railways prices in 1995, an obscene overcharge).
“What about DEUTSCH?” she asked. “Will you take DEUTSCH?”
Across from me, Justin snorted.
“Yes,” said the conductor. “We will take deutsche marks.”
“THEN MAYBE WE DON’T HAVE TO WASH DISHES!”
I pulled on my cigarette and exhaled dramatically in the girls’ general direction.
The small crowd of stern assembled Czechs did not get the dishes joke, because the Czech penalty for not having enough money to pay for a meal probably involved being locked in a dungeon, like Václav Havel.
I removed my Walkman (in which I was enjoying a rare respite from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack thanks to Layla’s They Might Be Giants tape), now not even pretending to avoid the Schadenfreude of watching my countrywomen probably get thrown off a Czech train in the middle of nowhere. Freddie raised his head, clad as ever in the multicolored beret that covered his ponytail (don’t judge; every other guy had a ponytail in 1995), and peeked over the row in front of us to get another look.
“That is an affront against corduroy,” he declared, regarding the How Many Hours girl’s wide-wale skirt. I took Freddie’s comment as a personal validation of my own sartorial choices, given that I was at that moment also clad in corduroy, namely a pair of cutoffs with an approximately three-inch left-right length disparity, the result of my own recent hasty intervention with a pocket knife in the girls’ room at the Münster high school where we took our language classes. Ordinarily I would have doubted the sincerity of Freddie’s derision of what was quite clearly an attractive young lady, but he only had eyes for Layla, whose deep-olive complexion, waist-length black hair, gargantuan eyes, and teeny-tinyness made her a dead ringer for Princess Jasmine (albeit one who elected not to shave her legs or armpits).
Freddie and I continued pulling on our respective cigarettes. Ever the astute poseur, when at last my foul pouch of Drum ran out, I had begun alternating between L&M, his own preferred brand, and Gauloises, which came in a chic blue box and were heavily favored by Justin, who was currently doodling a map of Scotland. He was planning to go there at the end of the trip, because that was where, as he’d reminded us for the entire summer, he was possibly ironically and possibly seriously convinced he’d be locating and retrieving Excalibur.
“Justin, I hope before you go looking for your sword, you finally wash your hair,” I said. “It would be a shame to be so unkempt when you assume your destiny.”
I actually understood Justin’s plight better than anyone might have suspected, given that my own motives for going on the Münster summer program were similarly oblique and destiny-related. Sure, I wanted to goose my language level so that I could actually fulfill the terms of my hastily declared German major upon my glorious return to campus. (And that had clearly gone great.) But again, this was for the sole purpose of dedicating as large a portion of my remaining studies as possible to Franz Kafka, a collection of whose diaries and parables (still, alas, in translation) I was reading reverently while smoking and listening to “Particle Man.” I had at that point, thanks to four weeks with the Herrmanns, developed some doubts and insecurities about hanging around Germans. But I was still committed to learning enough of the language that I could read Kafka—who, as every Herrmann took turns to tell me, was not German—in the original.
Kafka in translation, I’d decided, was akin to carnal relations impeded by an industrial-strength prophylactic (which happened to be the only type of relations in which I had heretofore ever partaken, being a savvy nineties woman. I took the TLC “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” video very seriously). But with him, I wanted an absolutely pure experience of Schriftverkehr (“correspondence,” but literally “textual intercourse”). I wanted to absorb the words exactly as he wrote them, and I wanted to commune with his spirit. This would only happen via the twofold accomplishment of my learning German (which would, alas, take protracted effort), and my embarking on my own pilgrimage, in that summer of 1995, to the city where my deceased soul mate had spent the overwhelming majority of his life. I would pay homage to his birthplace (or, more accurately, the edifice that stood on its footprint); I would walk the path from his home to his office at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Union; I would take long, mournful Kafkan ambles in dark alleys at twilight and be visited by the ghosts that haunted his pages (Kafkan, obviously, since Kafkaesque was a word that people who’d never read Kafka used to pretend they had, and Kafkan was the word I’d read in the literary journals); I would pay my respects at his gravesite. Prague might not have held any stone-encased weaponry for me to extract, but it held my destiny nonetheless. And that destiny was, at this point, having its style severely cramped by the mere fact that I hailed from the same country as those girls at the other end of the car, who had spent the Germany-side portion of the journey extolling the literary superiority of V. C. Andrews’s work of incest-porn, Flowers in the Attic.
My patience for what was, in hindsight, a perfectly ordinary group of young women on the train was admittedly already worn thin due to my general American fatigue. Before being sprung to ride the rails of my own volition, I’d been sequestered on another infernal bus for two more weeks of Teutonic tourism amid the rankling homesickness of our Münster group. One socially maladapted Virginian, Wallace, was so distraught about the lack of “real food” in the Vaterland that he was almost in tears by the time we pulled into Berlin, our final stop—and, in his distraught state, he came to fisticuffs with the far more diminutive Ephraim, our trip’s only other Jewish participant, after referring to our hostel’s rudimentary bathing facilities, quite unfunnily, as “gas chamber showers.”
By the time my small cohort broke from the ranks of official collegiate tourism, my worldly nineties self had just about had it with culturally insensitive American WASPs (despite being half Anglo-Saxon myself). So when, in our last moments in the grimy Berlin-Lichtenberg rail station, which at the time handled
all travel to “the East,” some unshowered blond backpacker heard us speaking English, I was already on guard. He ambled up and asked, “How do you get to the center of town?”
Ugh. It was Berlin, dude, which anyone with a functional knowledge of German geography should know had until very recently been divided by a big-ass wall, and it had an East “Center,” Mitte (which was enormous), and a West “Center,” the Bahnhof Zoo. Did this guy not own any U2 albums?
“Do you mean, like, Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate and such?” Justin had asked.
“Sure,” said the guy.
After we directed him to the correct S-Bahn, he asked: “Do you, like, have to pay to ride?”
“It’s Germany, man,” said Justin. “They’re pretty anal.”
“Ahem,” I said. “Unser Zug fährt ab” (Our train is leaving). I hoped Mr. I-Don’t-Know-Anything-About-Germany-Schwarzfahrer might think I didn’t speak English.
“Sorry,” said Freddie. “We have to go. We’re going to Prague.”
“Oh really?” asked the guy. “I’m headed there next.”
“Ha,” said Justin. “Maybe we’ll see you there.”
“Seriously, you should probably buy an S-Bahn ticket,” said Layla.
As we’d boarded the train, Freddie—being all too aware of what had heretofore been my significant residual summer-long mopeage vis à vis a certain Dylan Gellner—gave me an elbow to the ribs. “Send me a postcard when you run into that guy in Prague.” Ugh, as if. At any rate, as soon as the train got moving, Ms. All Caps and her sorority sisters had started yakking at top volume and I forgot all about that doofus, since I had new Landsleute (literally “country-people”) to stoke my feelings of intracultural superiority.