Ferment, p.7
Ferment, page 7
After dinner, Martin and I talked a long time about our varying social universes.
“As an academic, I’ve never felt completely comfortable in academic circles,” I said. “My dirty fingernails make me feel like an outsider.” I took up with the ironworkers’ union after we adopted Nick in 2007 at the end of my PhD coursework and spent time building bridges and buildings. I could walk in that universe and speak its language. It was part of the working-class background I came from.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “Different classes and backgrounds demand shifts from one code to the other. I’ve found people stay in one class because of work and family and friends and breaking out of that class—finding the code—only happens with self-awareness and hard work.”
“Being a writer has its difficulties, too,” I said. “I’m always uncomfortable with writers unless we talk about our craft, of aesthetics, and of the personal insides it takes to be a writer. But I’ve always felt inferior to other writers and reluctantly let my work out to them.”
“I felt the same way when I started as a painter,” he said. “For many years. I felt minor to others with education, profession, and higher social status.” He looked out from his chair on the patio toward a horse grazing by the back fence.
“I suppose,” I said, “that comfort in different surroundings with different people comes after long experience and learning.”
“I’ve become comfortable with other artists,” he said. “Each of these universes you run in—the ironworker, the academic, and the writer—demand different languages, bearings, and actions. You just need to put yourself aside and go forward without thinking of what others might think of you or your work.”
“I still have a long way to go.”
“Not as far as you think,” he said and turned and smiled at me. “So, there, Pappnase, ease up. You’ll be fine. I know . . . you know you will.”
* * *
I woke early the next morning and walked down to Ivo’s study. I knew Nick and Virginia would sleep late and give me time to write in my journal. The depression I felt creeping up stood beside me like a ghost. I admitted its presence and took measures to keep it from welling up inside me. I breathed deeply and prepared myself to hold on, as that is sometimes the only way to deal with it. Hold on and know it passes. Writing felt good, almost lyrical in the silence and calm of Ivo’s space. I wanted the same kind of peace in Kansas City. I wondered, with all the needs and distractions of home, if I could ever achieve it.
After a while, I put on my shoes and walked down to a trail that led through the wheat fields above Niederberg and the vineyards in the Mühlertal valley, which fell into a dark crease in the plain. The day was clearing, and puffy clouds let sun peek through. The breeze off the fields chilled me, but walking made the blood flow into my head for the first time since we’d climbed on the plane. Except for the wind in the wheat and through the branches of isolated trees next to the trail, the only sounds were the whine of tires on pavement and the crunching of my shoes on the dirt track. I walked away the negative energy building inside and kept going for a couple of hours, down into the Mühlertal and to the Rhein below, then straight up the steep hill on Arenbergerstrasse. I kept thinking of my suicide attempt. With the great life I’d been given, what would that get me besides dead? These manias and depressions come but they always end. They always end. It was something I needed to remember.
The whole time, despite the turn in my mental disposition, it felt good to be back in Germany.
* * *
I reflect again on that evening with Ivo and Martin. Our conversations went in hundreds of different directions. I felt fulfilled being with my friends again. Even better was that Virginia and Nick were getting a lot out of it. The other day, Virginia told me I have such wonderful friends and there is something in me that draws good people into my orbit. I kissed her and said, “You and Nick.”
CHAPTER FIVE
COMING HOME
AN UNCERTAIN TREMOR of déjà vu hit me as Ivo parked the car in front of the Koblenz train station. It produced a kind of vertigo I’ve only ever felt when returning to familiar places and finding they are either much bigger or smaller than I recall.
The station had loomed large in my mind. The reality was more moderate. Thirty years before, I used the Koblenz station as the main exchange point from intercity trains to the regional coaches that took me to and from Trier on my rounds of the country. It felt smaller but no less familiar. I experienced again the excitement and despair that plagued me as I traveled the wine districts in search of a paid position at a winery. A little of that hopelessness stuck to me still. I tried to shake it off. With my family in tow and trains to catch, I had neither the time nor energy to indulge in depression.
The sun shone full, and the heat of the day radiated off the platform. We entrained on what used to be called the E-train (Eilzug), an express train that stopped at a few larger towns between Koblenz and Trier. Where E-trains used to be a dumpy collection of open-seating cars, this train possessed a modern flair. It sported two-storied cars with scenic views above and track-level seating below. The cars gleamed with glass partitions and comfortable seats. We took the upper story, so we could see over the bushes and trees lining the tracks. Ivo stood next to the train after we boarded. He waited, smiling and waving from time to time. We’d see him again in a couple of weeks but leaving him was still sad. As we pulled away, he walked next to the train until it sped along too fast for him to keep up.
“I really love Ivo,” Virginia said, once she settled back in her seat. “I’m still mourning Andrea. It’s not something I think I’ll ever get over. It feels like unfinished business.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “I never knew her, but I’m sorry for Ivo. He’s such a great guy. He has such nice things.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, he has all those books, sort of like you do, but they are set up like in a museum. His house is so quiet. And he has all those cool pictures Martin painted. The whole place is, well, just peaceful. And Martin . . . his English is funny but he tries. He’s a nice guy. You have such good friends.”
“Thanks, Nick.”
He opened a package of chips and looked in as if they were out to get him. He’s a very picky eater and would rather starve than try something new. At Ivo’s he ate bread and cheese but, even then, he piddled over the foreign-looking food. We talked him or, rather, begged and cajoled him into eating the sliced sausages. He nibbled and grimaced but ate some, assuaging Virginia’s constant worry over his nutrition. I feared he wasn’t going to fare well at Josef’s and Marlies’. Trying to get Nick to eat the food she made—which wasn’t going to be his normal mac-and-cheese or pepperoni pizza—would be a chore. After several morsels and considerations, Nick decided the chips were all right.
When I was first in Germany, I’d traveled this stretch from Koblenz to Trier dozens of times as I returned from wherever I wandered to stay overnight at the Fricks’ or to my tiny domicile in Trier after a weekend in Koblenz with Ivo and his parents. The trips melded together in memory. I recalled specific places, scenes, and feelings but not the precise times I’d seen these sights. I watched them all materialize again. Between my first forays into the German landscape through my second stint in the Vaterland and into my many visits, this stretch felt like the way home.
* * *
Memories of euphoria and of absolute darkness streamed through my mind. The first month in Germany in 1985 was so uncertain. Larry and I traveled from Kanzem through Koblenz and outward to Kaiserslautern, Mannheim, Munich, and Regensburg. We spent time in Hamburg and Freiburg. Several times, we took a long night train just to have a place to sleep.
Before we parted ways, Larry and I stayed with his friends— students and workers all over southern Germany. I recall one student in Regensburg who put us up for the night. We arrived at the station late in the evening. The old market was a noisy conglomerate of students and revelers. Light from fires set in low burners danced against the brick and stone. Outside the busy town center, the night was serenely quiet. We wound our way through narrow, empty streets and tiny alleyways. Atmospheric dimness, even darkness, lay on the residential districts. I slogged along behind Larry, who was doing better, mood-wise, than I. For days, we’d only napped on trains and snoozed on park benches. I was happy when we arrived at Larry’s friend’s apartment and I slept without dreaming. Larry’s friend had to wake early and get ready for school. I remember being resentful as he made his coffee and sack lunch. The burble and pop of the coffee-maker kept me from getting more shut-eye. Can’t he see I’m trying to sleep here?
Though my early travels are packed with peculiar incidents and comic situations, with boundless energy and deep depression, perhaps the strangest trip on this trans-Germany train ramble was to Berlin. Larry and I crossed the border at Helmstedt-Marienborn on a rainy day. The countryside spread in dark green fields and pastures at the frontier. Villages appeared on the hills and valleys in the distance like phantoms. I watched a small, drab car, likely a Lada or rickety Trabant, trundle down a long narrow road through the fields and wondered how different the person in the car was from me. I’d grown up hearing horrible stories about communism, communists, and life under the East German totalitarian regime. At one time or another, I’d been taught all East Germans lived in fear and oppression. They were backward and uneducated. The government punished all self-expression. I watched that car as the train stopped on the tracks and guards with their oversized officers’ caps boarded our car to check passports and transit tickets. There were no stops between Helmstedt and West Berlin. The officers asked questions in German, and Larry answered. They looked at our American passports and our train passes with deadpan faces. After an uncomfortable and officious moment, they stamped our passports and moved on. I looked back after the car. It had disappeared.
West Berlin impressed this child of the Cold War as an alternate reality. It possessed simultaneously a shabbiness that worn-out American cities have and a lively bustle marking a modern, flourishing metropolis. We’d learned in school that Berlin was a capitalist crown jewel in the middle of communist darkness. The city I experienced held none of that promise but instead occupied a gray area between my childhood vision of it and a starker reality. Military forces still occupied the city. West Berlin allegedly showcased a free-market fair of self-expression and consumer consumption. But the capitalist West subsidized nearly every aspect of the city’s commercial life. American and West German government money underwrote everything from the city government to the stabilization of prices for everyday items and food. The occupying troops were another source of income from the state. The Wall divided the city’s great sprawl. West Berlin had a cramped and anxious feeling. No one could enter or leave, except in certain, highly controlled ways. The East Germans built the Wall, allegedly, to keep the capitalist invaders out of their country. Everyone knew otherwise.
We stayed at a private-school dormitory in the city’s Alttempelhof quarter with Larry’s acquaintance Lukas Deptios, an Indonesian student. He wore white suits, colorful shirts, and spit-shined shoes. He carried a cane. He joked all the time as he led us around the winding streets of West Berlin like a seasoned tour guide. Checkpoint Charlie, the Olympic Stadium, the Zoo. I’ll never forget the Potsdamer Platz, a no-man’s-land seemingly forgotten by the West Berliners and disowned by the East but present in the consciousness of each. The Wall ran right through the old intersection of streets from prewar Berlin and over streetcar tracks in the savage, post-industrial waste. A few homeless people camped in shanties and plastic sheeting next to the Wall. Graffiti, much of it weather-faded, splattered the concrete.
The beer from the grocery near Lukas’ place was cheap, and the food at the school was good. Larry went off to visit friends, and I stayed back with Lukas and his classmates. We bought enough beer for all of us, plus some. I drank all the extra and got good and ripped for the first time since coming to Germany. I woke the next morning to a terrific hangover. It made me forget the darkness and depression I’d experienced since before I boarded the plane to Luxembourg. Sick as I was, the hangover felt comfortable. For once in my insomniac train ramble I found myself in territory I knew in one of the strangest places I’d ever been.
Later, Lukas, Larry, and I walked over to the Wall. I’d experienced nothing to that time more dreamlike. It ran up against buildings and divided residential blocks like a ship cleaving the ocean. Elaborate graffiti covered its western face. Raised platforms allowed tourists and military men alike to climb up and get a view of the Todesstreife (Death Strip) beyond the Wall’s humped top edge. Guards in a tower in the middle of the strip watched us through huge binoculars. They wore pea-green uniforms and carried automatic rifles. Two men with dogs and machine guns patrolled a paved road beyond the barbed-wire fences, tank traps, and spiked steel grids called Stalinrasen (Stalin grass). I imagined myself getting across the no-man’s land and climbing over a fence to land on those spikes. I’d never seen anything meaner.
Though it was right in front of me, the whole scene—the towers, the Death Strip, the fences, and Stalinrasen—might as well have been as far from me as the moon. The world beyond the Wall was gray and alien. The buildings and streets spread through the eastern city much like those on the west. But a smoky, factory-like atmosphere clouded the scenery. On the West, people thronged through the streets and traffic moved in a frenzy. The streets east of the wall were empty. Alexanderturm, the great radio mast built to show the East’s technical prowess, towered over the city. Its stainless-steel-and-glass ball set 650 feet above the ground turned like an all-seeing eye keeping people and machines in check.
Larry went his own way after about ten days of our sojourn across Germany. I had no deadlines but the end of my month pass. My only errand was to knock on winery doors anywhere Germans grew grapes. I slept in stations when I’d missed last trains out or wanted to board early the next morning. One night after a string of days when I’d catnapped on park benches and aboard trains, I walked out of the station at Mannheim at midnight. I’d had my fill of schnapps and beer and felt the pull of sleep. But other overnighters and revelers made the place too noisy for shut-eye. I lit out and sacked out under the first bridge I came across. Below, a little stream bubbled. The night was dark, and I had nothing but a cigarette lighter to lead my way. I climbed down past the bridge rail and bushes and set my meager camp—a plastic groundsheet and sleeping bag—next to the abutment. I heard the traffic above for a few minutes and came to late the next afternoon.
I visited girlfriends, too. The Luxembourger whom I met on the plane, Monique, invited me for a weekend at her family’s farm not far from Echternach on the Luxembourg-German border. The farm had belonged to her family for generations. Her brothers and father worked like animals to keep the place up. Their fields spread out over a plain and into a stream valley. They had corn and beans, but also livestock and fallow land. The farmhouse straddled a meadow beneath a large, heavily wooded hill. The great humped slate roof rose over the building of pale-brown stone. The whole place possessed the weight of age and, to me, an aspect I’d seen in romantic pictures of the European countryside.
The first afternoon I came to visit, Monique’s mother, Mainsy, sat in the house’s drawing room. Dark wood and family heirlooms surrounded us. She made us tea and brought out cookies and cakes. She was glad to have an American as a guest. She spoke flawless English. Monique and I listened as she told tales of growing up on her family’s farm and weekends she spent taking in life in Echternach— Luxemburg’s oldest town and the biggest in the area. She sometimes traveled to Luxembourg City, particularly in the days following the war. It was, she said, the largest city she’d ever been in until she went to Paris when she was in her twenties.
Mainsy then told of the American soldiers who liberated Luxembourg in World War II. She was a young girl when an African American regiment came through the farm as the Germans retreated.
“The Americans were kind men, gentle, with a good deal of character,” she said. “My family hid in the cellar when the soldiers came over the hill. But I was caught out in the barn. I was climbing the ladder to the loft when a soldier yelled at me to stop. I froze and looked down at the him.
“I had never seen a black man before. He smiled in the kindest way and motioned me to come down. He offered me cigarettes and gum. He took me by the arm and joined the other soldiers, who’d opened the cellar door, their guns ready. It was very tense and time passed slowly. But when they found my family had no weapons, they climbed down and handed out chocolates and cigarettes. Those Black soldiers were the first Americans I ever met.”
My romance with Monique had begun almost from the moment we stepped off the plane. It lasted through my first tenuous months of travel and into the period after I’d settled in Trier. She visited me there for day trips and shopping. One winter Saturday afternoon, Monique told me she was afraid she was pregnant. Terror paralyzed me. I didn’t know what to say. We were walking up a side street by the Trier train station, near where she’d parked her car. The sun cut through the cold day. Leafless in the wind, the trees seemed to shiver.
