German Lessons

Boston had a patchy, disconsolate feel in those years, the mid-Seventies. Girls with long hair and long skirts still walked along Charles Street in bare feet, but the Sixties bloom was off; you found yourself worrying that these flower children would step on broken glass or that parasites would penetrate the dirty soles of their naked feet, which were stained green from wandering on the Common. The cultural revolution had become saturated in uncleanness. Ed Trimble felt unclean and guilty. He had moved to the city alone, having left a family behind in New Hampshire. His wife and he ran a small real estate firm in Peterborough, and Arlene made most of the sales. She had more gusto and social grace; she didn't let her real feelings about a property sour her pitch. He resented her superior success; he knew she could hold things together if he pulled out for a time. He needed space; things were up in the air. In this interim, with the begrimed conveniences of a city all about him, he saw a chance to fill some of his gaps. Guided by the yellow pages, he enlisted in German lessons at a so-called Language Institute in Cambridge.

The Institute turned out to be an ordinary wooden house north of Central Square, and the class a ragged handful of other gap fillers, some of them not much younger than he, and the classroom a small basement room where an excess of fluorescent lighting blazed as if to overcome the smallness with brightness. Their teacher was Frau Mueller--Müller in Germany--and their textbook was Deutsch als Fremdsprache, a slender blue tome designed, as the multilingual cover announced, for speakers of any other language. It was illustrated with photographs that Ed found alienating--the people in them could have been Americans but for an edge of formality and the ubiquity of Mercedes cars. The men, even the auto mechanics, wore neckties, and the young women sported slightly outdated miniskirts and Jackie Kennedy hairdos, teased into glossy bulk. Ed's older brother had acquired a shrapnel wound and a lifelong limp in the Ardennes Offensive, and Ed rather resented the prim, bloodless prosperity revealed in these lesson illustrations. Now, while the U.S. was risking troops and going broke protecting what was left of their country from the Russians, these defeated Huns, sleek and smug, were wallowing in an ideal capitalism.

Frau Mueller did not look like the well-groomed women in the photographs. Her hair, straw color fading to gray, had been pulled back into a streaky ponytail; stray strands fell untidily around her face. She dressed in the absentminded Cambridge manner, adding woolly layers as the summer waned and autumn deepened into winter. To Ed she seemed much older than he, but perhaps the difference was as little as five years; she had just been through more. Her nose came to a sharp tip reddened by perpetual sniffles; her thick spectacles magnified pale-lashed eyes that twinkled sometimes as if remembering a joke it would be too much trouble to explain.

While Deutsch als Fremdsprache contained no English, Frau Mueller's accompanying guidance contained plenty of it, much of it focused on fine points of English grammar. Ed knew this was wrong; he had taken enough language courses-- French, Spanish, both mostly forgotten--to know that the modern method, proven over and over, was immersion, no matter how painful at first for the students and the native speaker leading them. When they came, after 10 or so lessons, to the German subjunctive, she informed the class, "Your English subjunctive fascinates me. It does not seem--how can I say this?--quite serious. When does one employ it? Give me examples."

"If I were king," Ed hesitantly offered.

"If any man sin," timidly chimed in a student called Andrea--quoting, Ed was touched to realize, The Book of Common Prayer.

Frau Mueller's eyes, twinkling, darted around her mostly silent little flock. "Ah," she triumphantly told them, "you must think for examples. If the subjunctive in English did not exist--if it exist not, would it be correct to say?--no one would miss it! No one would notice! That is not the case in German. We use it all the time. Not to use it would be a serious discourtesy. It would sound--can I use the word?--pushy. Germans are always being described as pushy, yes? I think it is fascinating, the looseness of English."

"Aber--Englisch hat Regeln," Ed protested, hoping that that was the plural of Regel, and the accusative. The rest of the class looked at him as if he were crazy trying to communicate in German.

"Regelung," Frau Mueller smiled. "Eine Kleine."

Ed found German disagreeable and opaque; its closeness to English clouded his mind. Reading, in the lesson Im Restaurant, the fictional Herr Weber's polite request, "Vielleicht haben Sie einen Tisch am Fenster?" he had to fight the impulse to make Tisch into dish and Fenster into fender. He might have quit the class but for Andrea. In this disordered period of his life, she radiated, though well advanced into her 30s, a healing innocence. She was on the small side, with the wide-eyed, washed-out face of an aging child, her lips the same color as her cheeks and clear brow. As winter closed in, her delicate lips cracked, and she kept applying a lip balm that made them, under the harsh fluorescent lights, gleam.

Frau Mueller not only spoke too much English, but when it came time for the class to examine the assigned German texts, she waved them aside as if their meaning was obvious to all. Little was obvious to Ed, including the differences between noch and doch. Doch seemed to be untranslatable, sheer padding, like the English word well--but the utility and sense of well were inexpressibly apparent. Andrea was less indignant than he, coming up against the language barrier. He and she began to sit side by side in class and to arrive with lessons they had worked up together, either in the underfurnished two rooms he rented in the South End or on the sofa or bed of Andrea's apartment, the third floor of a stately Cambridge house on Fayerweather Street; the genteel landlady was a professor's widow. Andrea shared the third floor with a female cellist who was often away, performing. She herself was a parttime librarian, on duty evenings at an East Cambridge branch of the city system. Her immurement in books and her acquired skill at aurally deciphering what the library's minority patrons wanted enabled her to see through the opacity of the German texts into a sphere of human meaning. He even once caught her, as they coped side by side with a set passage from Brecht, laughing at a joke that had leaped out at her. Feminine intuition: Arlene back in New Hampshire had possessed it also but had used it less and less to fathom his desires. When he and this new mate, an aging flower child, a vegetarian and peacenik, made love, she seemed a filmy extension of his wishes. Her gentle shyness merged with a knowingness, an experience of other partners, that slightly unnerved Ed. She had been, in a sweet way, corrupted.

His and Andrea's becoming a kind of couple in German class, and being somewhat older than the other students, won them an unlooked-for honor; before Christmas, as the first term was ending, Frau Mueller invited them to tea. "Only if you like," she said.

"You've used the subjunctive!" Ed told her.

She half-smiled--her smile was rarely more than half, diluted by a nagging wariness--and said, "I think it was merely the conditional."

She lived in one of three squat brick apartment buildings built on an old Kenmore Square industrial site; the complex had the small-windowed look of a modern prison but lacked the (continued on page 148) German Lessons (continued from page 82) barbed wire and guard towers. Ed and Andrea would not have gone except that they did not know how to decline an invitation that clumsily crossed the American line between paid instruction and social friendship. "What do you say? Nein, danke?" Ed asked.

"You don't want to hurt her feelings," Andrea pointed out. This excursion was a step for them, too, venturing forth for the first time to be entertained as a couple. As a present they took something that they considered, after much deliberation, to be uniquely American--a tin log cabin full of maple syrup. Though, without pancakes, did maple syrup make any sense?

They were taken unawares when a man, speaking in the thick, comical accent of a stage German, responded over the security speaker at the entrance and then greeted them in the dark hall. "I am Hedwig's husband, Franz," he told them, pronouncing the name "Hettvig." "It is werry obliching of you to come." He too sensed something strange about the occasion, its awkward reaching out.

Tea, it developed, was not offered, though cookies, sprinkled with red and green sugar in honor of the Christmas season, had been set out, along with some miniature fruit tarts still in their pleated wax-paper cups from the deli. Franz urged a beer, an imported Löwenbräu, upon Ed, and for Andrea, who did not drink or smoke or eat meat or fish--"nothing with a face" was her creed--he found a Coke in the back of the refrigerator. She did not drink caffeinated soft drinks, either, Ed knew, but with a docility that broke his heart she accepted this offering from her host. Franz was plump but energetic, with thinning blond hair combed straight back on his skull; his scalp was dewy and his shirt damp, as if in silent comment upon the overheated airlessness of this rented flat.

In her husband's presence, an invisible burden seemed to slip from Frau Mueller; she became languid and betranced, sipping an amber drink that he quickly replenished when the ice cubes settled to the bottom. She seemed pleased to have the conversation focus on Franz. He was a photographer--weddings, graduations, bar and bat mitzvahs. "To the Orientals especially," Franz explained, "the photographer is more important than the minister. He iss the minister, in practical fact. He iss the Gott who says, 'Let sare be light' and this passink event be made--Was ist 'ewig,' Liebchen?"

"Eternal," Frau Mueller supplied, out of her smiling, drifting state.

The living room was configured like a basement: Steps led up to a floor above, and the triangular space beneath the stairs was filled with stacks of magazines. Ed, who had taken the easy chair nearest the stairs, slowly saw that most of the saved magazines were Playboys and Penthouses and Hustlers. On his second Löwenbräu Ed felt empowered to remark upon this unusual domestic archive. His zealous host hopped up and placed a few in his hands, urging him to flip through. The glossy pages reminded Ed of a rose grower's catalog, so many vivid shades of pink and red, even purple; Franz explained, "They use mirrors, to focus light upon"--he hesitated, glancing toward Andrea--"chust that spot."

Ed too glanced at Andrea and was startled by the angelic beauty of her face, blankly gazing elsewhere in serene ignorance that the men were discussing mirrors focused on vaginas. She was a silverpoint beauty, all outline, transparent to the radiance beneath things: The sudden contrast, perhaps, with the dirty girls of Penthouse, their spread legs and strained leers, created the impression. She was so good, so abstemious, that Ed saw, sinkingly, that she could never be his. This glimpse of truth persisted when most of the details of the slightly mad tea party had faded.

•

The Muellers wanted, it seemed, to talk about themselves. Of this couple, the man was the natural teacher, the natural sharer and salesman. Franz had been a young soldier in the Wehrmacht and had ingratiated himself with the two great armies that had worked defeat upon his own. As a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union he had learned enough Russian to make himself useful and win favored treatment in a harsh environment. Then, repatriated to the Western zone, he had learned the American version of English. He had acquired skills, photography being only one of them. Weekdays he worked at MIT as a lab technician. Hedwig and he had come to the United States nearly 10 years ago, already linked by marriage.

If they ever described how they had met, or what dream had brought them to the United States, Ed, mellow on Löwenbräu, let it slip through his mind.

As Hedwig's third tea-colored drink dwindled before her, her languid passivity warmed into lax confidingness. She called Franz by a nickname--"Affe," and he responded with "Affekind." Monkey and baby monkey. She shocked Ed by referring, out of the blue, to Franz's "cute little heinie." The word heinie was one Ed had not heard since his childhood, and American women in the Seventies still kept to themselves any interest in men's derrieres--the words bum and butt and ass were saved for intimacy. He reasoned that the two Germans, childless, in strange and formerly hostile territory, would make much of their sexual bond. But here among the four of them it was as if, in their eagerness to achieve closeness, the couple were using sex as a stalking horse for darker confidences. These were real Germans, Ed told himself--the people his brother had fought against, not the "Dutch" who had come to this country in the last century to be farmers or brewers, and not the Jewish Germans who had come here to flee Hitler. These Germans had stayed home, and fought.

Late in their little party, the early December night tightening cozily around them, Hedwig announced, with a smile rather broader than her usual wary one, "I was a Hitler bitch." She meant that she had been, in her teens, with millions of others, a member of the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Maidens. The matter had arisen from her description, fascinating to the Americans--Ed had been a boy during the war and Andrea was not yet born--of the Führer's voice over the radio. "It was terrible," Hedwig said, picking her words with special care, shutting her eyes as if to hear it again, "but exciting. A shrieking like an angry husband with his wife. He loves her, but she must shape up. Both of you know, of course, how in a German sentence the verb of a compound form must come at the end of a sentence, however lengthy; he was excused from that. Hitler was exempted from grammar. It was a mark of how far above us he was."

And Ed saw on her face a flicker of grammatical doubt as she rechecked the last sentence in her head and could find nothing wrong with it, odd as it had sounded in her ears.

•

Two other shared occasions, on the scant social ground where Ed and Andrea and Franz and Hedwig met, remained, decades later, in Ed's leaky memory. First, there was a bitter cold January night in which the two couples and another (if Luke and Susan, also from the German class, could be called a couple, Luke being generally thought to be gay) had gone out to eat together. In the class, where dwindled enrollment encouraged an even looser informality, Hedwig, digressing from the lesson on weil, um zu and damit, had expressed a desire for more authentic Cantonese cuisine than the "mongrelized"--she pronounced the English word deliberately, in apparent innocence of its evil connotations--fare offered as Chinese food. Susan, a large-framed, exuberant brunette given to sweeping pronouncements, had responded that she knew just the place, an unbelievably tiny family restaurant in Chinatown. It was agreed that after the next lesson--lessons occurred in the late afternoon, the students emerging from claustrophobic brightness into the January dark--Franz would pick up the five of them in his car, which turned out to be an early-Sixties Buick, proudly maintained. The Americans, climbing in, giggled at its largeness, its inner swaths of soft velour, reminiscent of their parents' more expansive America. Chinatown proved too cramped and crowded for the spacious car, and Franz finally took a spot at a corner on Beach Street, his front bumper and knobby chrome grille protruding almost into traffic.

The meal, deftly served in a smoky, clattering congestion by what seemed a pack of children in slippers, fell short of Susan's expectations, but no one else complained. The Tsingtao beer tickled Franz's palate, and he insisted, against feeble objections from his impecunious crew, on picking up the check. When, however, overfed and overheated and talking too loud, they all went back out into the freezing January night, the spot on Beach Street where Franz's car had been parked was empty. The nostalgic big Buick was gone. It had vanished.

Ed, at heart a country boy, assumed the worst: The car had been stolen; the loss was total and irremediable. He could walk back to the South End, and he resentfully pictured the long trek, by taxi or T, that he must endure to return Andrea to her Cambridge widow's house. The others, more city-smart, took a less dire view of the disappearance. Franz and Luke agreed that the car, illegally parked, had been towed by the police, and a call, from an imperfectly vandalized pay phone, with Luke doing the talking, confirmed that this was the case. The car was being held captive at the great fenced-in impoundment lot beyond the Berkeley Street overpass of the Massachusetts Turnpike, to be released upon payment of fine and fees. The Muellers offered to say good night on Beach Street right then and take a taxi to ransom their automobile, but the Americans would not hear of it. There were too many for a cab, so all walked together, their cheeks on fire with the cold, the mile to the dismal civic site.

Susan, in white earmuffs and a long striped scarf wound around her neck, led the parade, her dark hair gleaming beneath the streetlights as broken glass glittered all around. Andrea, it seemed to Ed, glowed in a religious rapture; the physical challenge of the trudge through the litter and the desolate urban margins of the then-new turnpike, with a group goal of redeeming a lost thing, spoke to her ascetic spirit. As their parade moved through the blasted cityscape, its rubble and battered wire fencing and hard-frozen puddles, Ed kept thinking of bombed Berlin, and of cities Berlin had bombed, and of the black-and-white wartime movies that had communicated to his childhood the secret exhilaration lodged within disaster and ruin.

It was an episode of unequaled solidarity and spontaneous fun with the Germans. Franz had paid for their feast in cash, in those days before credit cards were universal tender, and found himself lacking the dollars that the heavy-lidded, implacable police clerk demanded from within his fortified and snugly heated shack. The others quickly made up the sum, raising their American voices as if to hide Franz's accent. The cop did not like the accent, nor Franz's ingratiating manner; he suspected that his leg was being pulled. He was used to sullen hostility, not a cluster of tow-truck victims happily gabbling. The German students clambered into the liberated vintage sedan like schoolmates on an educational outing that had gone slightly, delightfully awry.

•

And then there was the spring party, the end of German lessons. It took place not in the Muellers' dank ground-floor Kenmore Square apartment but in a new, more spacious one, on a fourth floor, in Boston, near the Massachusetts College of Art and, across the trolley tracks, Mission Hill. Out here, beyond the Museum of Fine Arts, the city had a rakish low-rent feeling, a bohemian swagger. The festivity was ambitious; all the students from both terms had been invited, with their significant others, plus associates in the photography studio where Franz worked and various other strays the Germans had rounded up. In this ungainly gathering Franz gamely bustled back and forth, transporting beers and other beverages, an adroit, cheerfully sweating factotum, while Hedwig seemed paralyzed and dazed by the extent of her hospitality.

Some of the female students had brought hors d'oeuvres--raw vegetables with a hummus dip, tepid cheese puffs--but as the hours went by these morsels evaporated, as did the initial abundance of goodwill and forced conversation. A table by the big bay window had been set with paper plates and napkins and cutlery, but where was the food? Frau Professor sat in a thronelike ladder-back chair while her guests circulated with less and less energy, and it came to Ed that he had no business here, among these young and would-be young, these parttime students and half-baked culture workers. Spring was the liveliest time for real estate in Peterborough, and his lawn and garden would need tending. Andrea came up to him with her version of the same feeling. She had finally disengaged herself from an elegant black photographer's assistant, in torn jeans and a purple dashiki, who kept blowing some sort of smoke into her face. She was uncharacteristically querulous. "I'm starving. What's happening?" she said.

"Ask Hedwig."

"That would be rude, wouldn't it? We're guests. We take what comes." Ed heard in this the implication that he too, in his city sojourn, had taken what came.

He stuck to the immediate topic. "But nothing is coming. Forthcoming."

"She doesn't move."

Over Andrea's shoulder Ed saw Frau Mueller still in her chair, smiling even though no one was talking to her, and it came to him that she was stoned. If not stoned on a controlled substance, then on a cumulative dose of being German, a Hitler bitch in a foreign land where the subjunctive was withering away and everything was mongrelized. America had worn her down. In a corner of the room, Franz, sweating, was on the telephone. What seemed another hour later, a Hispanic deliveryman came through the door bearing a baby-size bundle wrapped in butcher paper. Hedwig made a helpless welcoming gesture by raising one arm and called, "Franz!" It was, rumors ran through the sagging party, a pork roast, and Franz was now placing it in the oven. Andrea said to Ed, "It'll take till midnight. I want to go home."

"Me too, Liebchen." Ed had had one too many Löwenbräus.

"Would it be too rude to leave?"

"I don't think it'll be noticed."

"Should we say good-bye to the Muellers?"

"No. It'll hurt their feelings. Anyway, this whole party is a good-bye. Verstehen Sie?"

She looked up at him with her childlike face, her pale eyes wide and her lower lip retracted beneath the upper, and understood. "Ja," she said. He sensed she was trying not to cry, but he lacked the energy to put his arms around her. The only trouble with Andrea was that she made no resistance: There was not enough to push against. She had been a silverpoint outline.

•

Word filtered back to him in New Hampshire, over the years, of the two Germans. Andrea wrote him several times at first, assuring him that his decision to return was a wise one-- "Your dear heart never seemed to be in Boston." Luke and Susan sent annual Christmas cards. They had taken up living together, though they never announced a marriage. Franz and Hedwig, they wrote, had left New England for the Southwest, where they were swallowed up like raindrops in the desert. It was as if they had sought to lose themselves in the American landscape that least resembled damp, planned, crowded Germany.

Word came through, in the 1980s, that they were divorced. Franz had moved to southern California, the Vatican of camera work. But he was long out of photography and with his new wife had begun a catering service. Then, Susan's florid, big handwriting confided, her cards to Hedwig were returned by the Phoenix post office, and it seemed likely that without Franz to take care of her she had died. But an old photography associate of Franz's later told Luke, at a wedding in Brattleboro, that it was Franz who had died, of a heart attack.

In the late 1990s Arlene began to agitate for foreign travel, before they became too old and lame a couple to manage it. At the turn of the century they signed up for a cruise of the Elbe and then three days in reunited Berlin. One of their young guides, slim and sharp-featured, with straw-colored hair, reminded Ed of Hedwig, with her wary half-smile and her relentless seriousness. Her name was Greta. At the tour stop in Potsdam she lectured their group of footsore, aging Americans too lengthily and dogmatically, insisting that Truman and Atlee had been babies in 1945, new to power, and at the mercy of canny Joe Stalin, so that a great chunk of Germany had been stolen and given to Poland. "They were babies," she repeated. Her English was almost flawless and so fluent that the group tended to drift toward the other, less opinionated guide. Greta was what Hedwig might have been had she had a grievance, a sense of having been wronged instead of the opposite. She had grown up under East German Communism, lived by her wits in the capitalist economy fallen upon her, and was ready to fight, without apologies to anyone.

Though Ed listened carefully on all sides of him, on the street and at the opera house and in restaurants, he almost never recognized an expression or phrase; it was as if he had never taken German lessons at all, except that a waitress in Wittenberg complimented him, in English, on his pronunciation when he read aloud his choices to her from the menu.

"Why, darling!" Arlene said dryly beside him. "That was very impressive."

"I was not," he told her, remembering how Andrea with such dear sad expertise would fit her small but wiry body to his, "much of a student."

She was on the small side, with the wide-eyed, washed-out face of an aging child.