by Lauren Oyler
I spent a couple of minutes reading her posts and trying to remember who she might be before I became bored and clicked back to my timeline. Even though I knew I had the tools to divine her identity, I stopped caring quickly—what did it matter? This is the struggle with describing social media: it devours importance. It happened when I inevitably found myself on Felix’s inactive Instagram account, too; I would scroll through his old posts, pick one I thought seemed interesting—the photos of the Denver International Airport, which is believed to be situated on top of an underground meeting place for the New World Order, as well as home to a cursed blue horse statue named Blucifer, were striking—and then scan through the hashtags and commenters, trying to see if anything looked familiar. Sometimes I’d search the theory online, as if trying to retrace Felix’s steps: Where had he found it? What parts did he choose to highlight? But all I gained was a rounder understanding of Truths Hidden in Plain Sight. It was boring. To my surprise, very few of the theories Felix posted had been inspired by the 2016 election, as had been suggested by the news articles I’d skimmed; Trump had merely made existing conspiracies seem more viable. After becoming disgusted with OkCupid and vowing to stop looking at social media the next day, I usually managed to get out of bed by lunch, to do aimless European wandering of the sort I might later romanticize.
“Will you try to stay in Berlin?” Frieda asked one day as I ate yogurt next to her collection of cookbooks and houseplant literature. I realized I hadn’t thought about it; if someone asked how I liked living there I made something up. I looked at her blankly, like an idiot, and said, “I don’t know . . .” I made an expression to suggest this was a real dilemma I’d been wrestling with internally. My tourist visa lasted another two months, and I had not yet purchased a return flight or come up with anything I’d like to do back in the United States, but I was also clearly having some kind of psychological problem that Berlin, while not the cause, perhaps could not be said to be helping. (The ex-boyfriends would like to interject here, but they feel that would be overstepping boundaries.) I asked her to let me know if she heard of any apartments I could live in when this sublet was over. “I guess if I stay I should take a German class . . .” I added, totally not meaning it at all, and she replied, “Why? English is better.”
I had to admit I agreed with her. I spoke to Germans so rarely that the language barrier didn’t register as part of the overall experience of living in Germany. Naturally it was limiting in the usual ways—many people, when hearing someone struggle with their language, assume stupidity. Older Germans had a particularly humiliating tone to their typical response, an exaggerated nasal Heh? that matched a squinting snarl. Younger Germans just spoke to me in English, which was possibly worse, being politely accommodated for a deficiency over which I had full control. But it was nice to be in a crowd but separate from it, to feel no pressure to participate, and Frieda seemed to be giving me her blessing to appreciate the naughty pleasure this provided. Already superior to the New York subway system in every way, the U-Bahn was a warm bath of incomprehensibility. If a man approached me in the street or at a bar where I was drinking alone and said, “[German]?” I was able to smile apologetically and continue what I was doing without having to awkwardly turn him down. Most people, as that tourist’s cliché goes, spoke English, but the men who approached strange women in public were, on average, much worse at it. One day a man outside my apartment—short, wearing a T-shirt that said WHATEVER, smiling too much—managed to ensnare me for almost ten minutes, eager to practice, asking asking asking, what I did, why I was in Berlin, what is it like to work as an architect, and after he informed me that he had just come from an allergy test and I had to ask him three times what he was saying, I watched him realize it was futile, that having to stack English phrases together for the length of the beer he was about to propose we have together would be just too exhausting, that his English accent probably wasn’t as good as he’d been led to believe. I said I had to meet a friend and walked away quickly in the opposite direction of where I actually needed to go. Whenever I overheard a native English speaker—the Weserstrasse was almost entirely Anglophone in the evenings—it was unbearably distracting. It was like everyone was having caricatures of conversation, always explaining their recent breakups or noting the prevalence of good bars in the neighborhood, and soon enough I would remember that all the elegant European accents around me were probably conveying ideas equally vapid and wisdom just as conventional, and I would imagine trite observations filling in the empty space around me until I could not see or hear or breathe. I couldn’t tell if Germans actually spoke more quietly or if I just perceived them as quiet because I didn’t understand what they were saying. Americans are often considered loud and obnoxious, but that might have been because our language occupied a rare position in being both outlying and recognizable, and therefore invasive.
Six weeks after I arrived, though it felt like a year, or one very long day of moderate but continuous drinking, it was mid-April, and the woman I was subletting from emailed to say she was going to stay in Portugal because she had fallen in love with an oboist. Was I interested in keeping the room for three more months, at least? For some reason, I was. I’d have to get a visa, but I’d heard it wasn’t hard to do—after all, Felix had done it—and despite my moping I didn’t want to go back to New York because it would feel like I’d wasted my time, so I said sure, I’ll waste more, until it can be retrospectively determined not wasted.
As soon as I made this decision, I could think of nothing else. Maybe I would get an apartment with a balcony and stop hating percolated coffee. Maybe I would give up the online dates and fall in love with a German who would teach me his language, allowing me to surprise him with my natural proclivity for grammar. Maybe he would be from Hamburg—stable yet able to party, reachable by train yet sturdily seafaring. I looked up how to stay there legally.
The blogs had thousands of words of advice. The gist of it was: The experience is harrowing but ultimately fine if you are from the United States and especially if you are from the United States and white. I could apply as a freelancer for what was referred to as the “artist visa,” the sound of which I liked. To do this I would have to compile many documents proving German society’s need for my unique services and confirming I was unlikely to require government assistance, which I’d present to an interviewer at the Ausländerbehörde, a word I couldn’t help mistranslating in my head as “hoard of foreigners.” I was advised to make an appointment to avoid long and sometimes impossible wait times at the office, which had limited hours despite need.
When I went to the designated website, available in a passive English, the first available appointment was four months away. Having warned of this, the blogs were smug, and they relished taunting me with possible solutions, none of which were ideal. I could book an appointment and wait, though my standard three-month tourist visa would expire in a month and a half. I could stay in the country as long as I had an appointment scheduled at the Ausländerbehörde; all would be fine as long as I did not miss the appointment, or attempt to leave the country before the date. I could also show up very early in the morning and try to get one of a limited number of walk-in spots, distributed by a take-a-number system, though none of the blogs seemed to have been written by someone who had managed this. To be clear: I know this is boring. I decided I would demonstrate my superiority to the blogs, which presented these options as either-or, by showing up one day to try and walk in as well as booking the earliest available appointment, in late July. I looked up a recommended freelancer’s plan to cover the health insurance requirement, which the blogs did not explain well except to underscore its chief importance, and then clicked over to my email, where I had three new messages from the expat panlist. Buzzing from mild productivity after weeks of desultory web browsing, I replied with interest to a post seeking an English-speaking person to “walk” nine-month-old twins every morning from eight until eleven and got an answer back rig
ht away. Both the woman who posted the ad and her husband were artists who worked from home, she American and he German, and now that they could stand to leave the babies to someone else for a couple of hours, ha ha, they guessed they couldn’t put off work any longer. Their apartment was about twenty minutes away from mine, and we agreed to meet there the next day.
I had managed to get a bike by this point, from a very tall Dutch woman selling it online—“It’s not stolen,” she assured me, though I hadn’t asked—so I rode it there. While I talked with the parents about my work as a freelance tax preparer in the U.S., I let one of the babies hold my finger and put it in his mouth as the other sitting up uneasily waved a brightly colored giraffe back and forth in front of his face. As I was explaining my job, my skills with spreadsheets and the pleasure I took in being able to soothe panicked scramblers, I knew it was a bad lie—a freelance tax preparer would have little need for a side job walking babies—but the inappropriateness didn’t seem to faze them. The two pursuits, accounting and babysitting, could be united by a desire to have a real, nontheoretical effect on people’s lives—to help them in confusing and stressful times, to be a small relief. It was only after I had made meaningful eye contact with both of the babies that the father, Holger, told me they’d met with a girl just before me and they were going to hire her, but if it didn’t work out they would call me. Though I had no stake in an early-morning babysitting job—indeed it probably would have sucked—I felt deflated, and on a date that night with a guy who did copyright law, I complained about it as if I were really, really disappointed. He told me I seemed like a very passionate person and squeezed my shoulder when we parted.
The next day I was running along the canal in the newly springlike weather thinking about whether I would like to be hit by a car when I missed a call: The girl had not shown up to walk the babies that morning, could I start tomorrow? The pay was seven euros an hour. I called them back and said sure. I added in my knowing-girlfriend voice that it was very strange that the girl had just not shown up, but the mother, Genevieve, replied, “Oh, that’s just Berlin.”
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DEAD BEHIND THE EYES AND WARM, THE BABIES WORE COORDINATED but not exactly matching outfits and, I was told, would wake up and cry if I remained stationary for too long. As Genevieve and I strapped them into the oblong pods of the double stroller, maneuvering their chubby arms as we needed and hushing tremors of sadness with our sweetest feminine voices, she asked me if I was happy Tax Day was over. I was tucking what I believed was an unnecessary blanket under a floppy leg and paused, confused; I was certainly not unhappy Tax Day had passed, but I didn’t know why my feelings about it were being asked of me by a recent acquaintance at eight in the morning in a foreign country whose tax season I had no idea about. I smiled with my mouth closed and said, “Who isn’t? Though of course as a socialist I believe the problem with Tax Day is that it doesn’t make enough people unhappy, ha ha,” and as she clarified, “I’m sure it’s very busy for you this time of the year,” I remembered my lie and rued myself. She stood up and looked at me suspiciously—or maybe I just believed it was suspiciously—before handing me the keys to the lock for the stroller. I tried to convey the air of a quiet, kept-to-herself woman who compartmentalized her life and who had taken on a side job as something to do, like a housewife or retiree. People were constantly taking part in strange and unimaginable situations—why not me? I’d told her I liked children. When you stopped to consider that many women like children enough to manufacture their own, it seemed markedly less strange that a gainfully employed tax professional of reproductive age might like them enough to spend fifteen hours a week in their presence for pay that is low but nevertheless would cover rent plus some. (My rent being so low that I am not going to tell you what it was, teetering as I am already on the border between likable and loathsome.) Maybe I wanted to practice caretaking. Maybe I was using it to distract myself from a problem or issue in my life. Genevieve didn’t know. It was absurd that people would just hand over their supposedly prized children to young and inexperienced strangers. Maybe I was doing an art project aimed at illustrating this. She’d better hope not.
Outside the babies squirmed and murmured as I paused to put on a podcast, an uninteresting interview with an author who had written a book that sounded uninteresting, and then I began to walk. The neighborhood was empty, the way I always wished New York could be when I had to get up early and go somewhere and entered the subway to find it already full and irritable at 7 a.m. and, knowing it had to do with class and gentrification, felt guilty about my annoyance at this. I regretted all the Berlin mornings I’d spent scrolling through my phone now that I knew such quiet expanses were at my disposal. The grocery store on the corner was closed; the line of mannequins in loud ball gowns posed in the dark window of a Turkish bridal shop; a single businessman strutted toward the U-Bahn as if he knew he shouldn’t be there. I crossed the street and the stroller bumped and caught on the cobblestones. As I crossed Kottbusser Damm to assess a bakery’s offerings the author laughed about how irritating it was to be asked to what extent her novels derived from her life, without saying to what extent her novels derived from her life. I walked past a group of Turkish women who looked at me and then looked at the babies. I was a normal age to have children so they might as well have been mine, but something about me, maybe my clothes, which were shabby, or my aura, which was ambivalent, told them I shouldn’t have them in my possession. After a while I peeked in at them and they were sleeping cutely, round cheeks flushed and pouched against their baby pillows, spittle glistening on their tiny lips, tufty hair tufting upward. The author said she thought having children contributed to the form and style of her books, written in stolen moments, necessarily short sections, simple, aphoristic sentences, more of an essay than a novel at times. Lots of women were writing fragmented books like this now, the interviewer pointed out. Having read several because they were easy to finish, I couldn’t help but object: this trendy style was melodramatic, insinuating utmost meaning where there was only hollow prose, and in its attempts to reflect the world as a sequence of distinct and clearly formed ideas, it ran counter to how reality actually worked. Especially, I had to assume, if you had a baby, which is a purposeful experience (don’t let it die) but also chaotic (it might die). Since the interviewer and the author agreed there was something distinctly feminine about this style, I felt guilty admitting it, but I saw no other choice: I did not like the style.