I cannot write today. I have used up all the words inside my mind.
Sometimes I lie in bed at night, trapped awake. The words will NOT stop. They unfurl themselves into sentences, bang whole paragraphs against my skull. I turn on the light, release them into my Moleskin, and brand new sentences rush in, take their place.
Right now: Start, stutter, stop. Start again, trip, spill it all beneath the table. No getting it back.
Some days it's the English that I lose. Cannot for the life of me locate "blissful" or "organic." Instead "glückselig" and "bio" stand stubbornly, arms folded, blocking all trespassers.
Other days I blog like a fiend. Then I walk to the counter, try to order a Kaffee, and the German squishes like marmalade in my mouth. I stand outside of me, watching. I KNOW how to shape that vowel. I KNOW how to click that consonant against my teeth. The barrista talks right back in English. Oh humble day! But I refuse. It's mush-mush Deutsch or nothing.
This whole idea I had: Move to Berlin, write a book (in English); speak flawless (German) within months. I'm thinking now, um, stupid.
What if, as I pitch forward into German, hooking my toes on grammar rules, clutching wildly at bigger, better words, my English writer's voice goes stale?
There goes the book.
What if, on the other hand, these daily posts, and later chapters, bar me from bilingualism? My only hope for mother-tongue perfection: eat/sleep/drink/think/talk/read and, yes, write, in German.
There goes that dream. It's one I've had for as long as I can remember. Maybe it's not supposed to happen. It comes from a screwy place: The shame I always had, on our trips to Deutschland, of my tainted self: American. I wanted so fiercely to be native, to pass for Bayer. Every linguistic slip-up, every cultural stumble, tore at me. Ironic, I know, this wanting to be German. They haven't always been the most beloved of Volk, you know.
Stateside I was hungry for belonging, too. I was always pretending. Sure, I'd watched Bonanza. Heard the Jackson Five. Eaten a Ding-Dong. Played with Barbie.
Liar.
I've still got that thing pulsing inside me — perfection, perfection, perfection. It seems like part of me has grown, though. The part that now bluntly asks German friends: "How do you say cobblestone?" Cashiers too: "What's that word you just used?" Or asks strangers at the Fahrkarte machine: "I need to buy a monthly ticket — will you show me?"
I feel a little bit proud every time I don't pretend (it's the nail not bitten, the gluten not eaten). I feel a little bit excited too. You create this opening. A step toward the unknown.
An otherwise predictable conversation might veer off: "Kopfsteinpflaster. Head plus Stone plus Band-Aid, okay, Pflaster also means Concrete. Crazy! I think 'cause the stone's heads face upward..." And the speaker sounds off, delighted — he's been handed the eyes of a stranger, his own life/language momentarily turned from familiar to foreign.
A momentary connection might be made: A dredlocked teen on the platform. "10-Uhr-Stunde means you can't ride till 10 a.m. Stüdent — No? Azubi: That means you're a superhero." He says it deadpan. Now he smiles. "Better pick Umweltkarte" Waits while the machine rejects my bills. "Try it the other way. Did you flip it?" Hovers till I succeed. "Now just don't lose it!" Spoken with a laugh. I walk away, feel happy. Ticket worth more than the 70 Euros I paid.
A purchase might even end with an invite: Falafel in Moabit, anyone?
Tomorrow I go to the Prolog language school in Schöneberg. That was the idea, you know, take intensive language courses for the first three weeks. ("Wha???" my cousin's husband said. "Three million people in Berlin, and you speak better German than at least one million." I protested; he persisted: "If you're going to take a language, at least make it one you don't know." "Chinese!" my cousin offered with a laugh. "Mandarin!")
I already tried Sprachenatelier on Tuesday. I had tested solidly into C1 (C2 being highest). The class, however, consisted of four B2s (two smiley Spaniards, one Japanese rocker, a Czech with worried eyes) and only two C1s (me and Aliou from Senegal). The teacher strode in. Fiftiesh. Bullet-breasted. Clad in hospital-white from neck to toe. She seized a stick of chalk. R O S E M A R I E she wrote, each letter a thunk against the board. She was a shorter, squatter version of Ms. Maxfield, my seventh-grade gym teacher. The Battle-axe, we called her. She gave me a D in basketball.
The lesson began with a looong discussion of Germany's kindergartens, with special focus on the beloved Einschulung celebration for first-timers. We were asked to discuss the preschool system in our own countries, and to guess the contents of the Zuckertüten Germany's first-graders are gifted (thanks to The Moms, my buddy Nathan and I might be the only San Franciscans who got Zuckertüten of our own before we trotted off to Cobb Elementary in 1976). After the break, we held a mock auction for own belongings.
It's not like I wasn't (re)learning German vocab (Radiergummi, durr). And it's not like I came out swinging when we tackled grammar exercises. In fact, I bombed. (You try naming the correct akkusativ or dativ prepositions for those twenty verbs.) It's also not like the story I wrote to accompany the girl-
Poor Rosemarie. I just kind of couldn't like her.
I couldn't like her because she enunciated words so super slow. I couldn't like her because she'd never heard of a Baccalaureate. I couldn't like her because the lesson plan was so very juvenile. And — the ugly truth — I couldn't like her because she treated me like nothing special. Oh, how she swooned over Aliou (grammar genius, I do not deny), insisting he was too good for us, offering him private lessons instead, personal coaching for his one lone failing — pronunciation so poor as to render him indecipherable, sounds catching like bits of crumbcake on his lips.
What about me? I wanted to know after class. Is this level right for me?
Oh, absolutely, she said. No question.
And so I quit.
Oh dear. Apparently I haven't gotten over my wanting to be The Star thing. I am Teacher's Pet to the bone.
Plus, I had so different a picture in my mind: Male teacher. Intense. Erudite. Handsome. Heated analysis of the Third Reich, the DDR. Dissections of Heinrich Böll, Günther Grass. Essays on Die Weisse Rose, next-generation anti-Semitism.
Oh, wait, that's Advanced German I'm talking about. Sarah Lawrence College, 2003, a classroom in Bates. That's Roland, pacing the room, a river of facts rushing from his lips. Chalk chasing so swift across the board, you never hear a thunk. The red of a scholar's passion rising to his cheeks. And that's me, pen sprinting, thoughts hurtling... historyliteraturelanguage... twisting happy as a fish in the teacher's stream.
You see. R O S E M A R I E never had a chance.
Tomorrow: Prolog. A class that's purely C1. I'm not hoping for much. Roland already ruined it.
If I quit, though, one good thing: A stay of execution for the writer's voice. English a-burbling at least another day.
Hey, would you look at that? I found my words after all.
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