This Really Isn't About You

by Jean Hannah Edelstein

  Who told you that? I said. That’s not true.

  Oh, said the HR director, again.

  I left the building.

  I will not come back, I said in an email, to HR and the company partners, until you have offered me a satisfactory solution to this problem.

  The company director called me. Please meet me, the company director said. I won’t come to the office, I said. We met in a coffee shop. The company director looked fraught. He offered me a coffee. I refused. The company director drank one. He added a lot of sugar.

  The thing is, the company director said, in a slow voice, this is an issue of consent versus non-consent.

  There is no way I would consent to this, I said. There is no one who could do this to me. If it was a stranger, I would have gotten the police. If it was a friend, I would have terminated our friendship. If it was an intimate partner, I would have ended the relationship.

  I said all this as if my view on the boundaries of sexual contact were a reasonable thing to discuss with the company director of a place where I worked.

  Well, he said, Jean, I just don’t know what to do.

  You’ll have to figure something out, I said.

  I left and worked from home.

  I really just want to go to work, I said to my friends.

  Of course, they said.

  It could have been worse, I said to my friends.

  My friends looked at me. I looked at them. There was nothing more to say after that.

  I waited for some days but I heard nothing from the company. So I wrote a long list of demands, conditions in which I would return to work. I would not ever have to work with him on a project again. I would not be in a room with him with the door closed. He would not be allowed to approach or speak to me in the office. He would have his desk moved so that it was far away from mine.

  The company agreed to the conditions. I went back to work.

  But I still had to see the man every day. And every time that I saw him I remembered the look in his beady, glassy eyes, and the feeling of his hands on me, gripping and twisting.

  He was working on the company’s most interesting project. Because I refused to work with him, they hired a freelancer to do what would have been my job. I sat at my desk and applied for other jobs at other companies.

  I avoided eye contact. I pretended I didn’t notice the people who didn’t talk to me any more. And the people who knew all the details but who didn’t say anything. I felt alone. To them, I wanted to say, What if this happened to a woman you loved? But I didn’t, because the difference between a woman who can be sexually assaulted and a woman who can’t is not whether a man loves her.

  A colleague left the company. She had leaving drinks on a Friday night. I had a cold, so I didn’t go. On Saturday morning another colleague called me. Guess who was drinking at the party last night, she said. I was speechless. I’m not even sure it’s an official company function, I said, I don’t think they’ll care.

  I hung up the phone and sat down on the floor of my bedroom and cried.

  I was wrong. On Tuesday they fired him. I was in a meeting for two hours and when I came back to my desk I had a stack of emails. At the top was one from one of the colleagues who hadn’t spoken to me since it happened. Just so you know, the colleague wrote, he’s my friend, but I support you.

  Why do you support me? I thought.

  I looked at the other emails. Furthest down in my inbox was one from the company director, sent to the whole company, announcing that he had been fired. More recent, an email from the company director, asking if we could speak for a moment.

  Sure, I said.

  We went into the boardroom.

  Today, said the company director, is the worst day of my life at this company.

  I’m sorry, I said, even though I was not sorry.

  I went for a walk around the block. Should I feel bad about this, I thought to myself, that he has been fired because I do not believe that it is acceptable to sexually assault one’s colleagues at the office Christmas party?

  I decided I should not feel bad about it.

  That was the second thing.

  The third thing.

  The third thing that happened was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Flotilla.

  I really liked the word ‘flotilla’. I’m sure I’d heard it before, in other contexts, but now I loved ‘flotilla’. I was charmed by the idea that the nation was going to celebrate one woman holding one unelected position of leadership for sixty years by sending some stately boats down a river. I was amazed that the river would be thronged on either side by people, twenty-first-century people, observing the stately boats. I liked the way ‘flotilla’ felt in my mouth as I pronounced it, slow and drawn out. I talked about it as much as I could. Are you excited about the flo-till-a? I said to the people at work who were still speaking to me. Sure? some of them said. I can’t wait for the flo-till-a! I exclaimed in response.

  The flotilla was on a Sunday in early June. People around the country who weren’t available to stand by the side of the Thames and watch the stately boats float past had been encouraged to hold old-fashioned street parties, to hang bunting from trees, to serve sponge cakes and tea from sets of china awarded to female ancestors in honour of achieving husbands.

  I didn’t care for the royal family as an institution, not once I realized that the chances of me becoming a princess were nil. When Prince William married Catherine Middleton the previous year, granting the whole nation a long weekend, Frank and I had fled on a first-thing-in-the-morning Eurostar to Paris, to make a point about our Republican position. When we arrived, we were very tired, and it was too early to check in to our hotel room, so we went around the corner and sat in a tabac, arriving just in time to see Prince William marry Catherine Middleton on the screens of the tabac’s dusty televisions. We sipped cafés noirs and ate hard croissants and felt resentment.

  But I didn’t think I would resent the flotilla: it was an antiquated event designed to celebrate an antiquated woman’s many decades holding an antiquated office in a country that was, it could not be denied, sometimes very antiquated.

  The sky was a classic English grey that morning, but Rich and his partner Laura had planned a party at their home, in any case: instead of jostling elbows with other fans of stately boats on the riverside, we’d enjoy the comfort of their flat while watching the procession on the television. When I climbed on my bike to cycle the five miles there it was just beginning to rain, but by the time I arrived it was sheeting down and I could no longer see where I was going through my glasses. Rich opened the door and regarded me and retreated. He returned with a towel.

  You’ll want to dry off before you come in, he said, as much for the sake of the apartment as for the sake of my sodden body.

  Enthusiasm is flagging, Rich continued, as I dried off. You need to do what you can to improve the enthusiasm.

  Inside the living room, there was indeed little enthusiasm. There were sandwiches and Victoria sponge and several of the cheeriest people I knew, but there was also a devastating spectacle, the pride of a nation represented by a joyless and troubling procession of boats listing to and fro in the storm. I was transfixed: the sheets of rain were coating the television cameras just as they had my glasses, making it difficult to see. The boats drifted down the river, manned by soaked skippers. On a special barge, the Royal Family observed with gritted teeth.

  The Duchess of Cambridge is wearing Alexander McQueen! a commentator trilled, while Kate Middleton wiped visible mucus from her nose with the edge of her sleeve.

  What a terrific, terrific celebration! another commentator declared, cutting to a group of weeping, sodden school children.

  We’re going to have an RAF flyover! cried a further presenter. He paused. Oh, he said, actually, it’s been paused due to the weather.

  This is a total shitshow! I said. This would never happen in America!

  Our spirits aren’t dampened! said the presenter, much like my moth
er on a long-ago Scottish beach caravan holiday, when she had to pretend each morning that we were having a good time even though we were kept awake all night by the howling of wind that seemed to threaten to pick the caravan up and dump it in the sea. We’re having a wonderful holiday! my brave mother said in those mornings, as we squeezed around the alcove table in the caravan kitchen, sniffling from summer colds as we slurped Weetabix and ate toasted Hovis spread with margarine.

  The BBC presenters held the mood of the nation in their hands. If they were honest, if they were true, if they said: This flotilla is unbelievably shit! Kate Middleton just wiped her nose on her sleeve! then Britain would fall apart.

  I realized then that I could never truly embrace the national resignation. I could never belong.

  Later that evening, I called my parents. They’d watched a bit of the flotilla on the American news.

  How are you? said my mother.

  I’m despondent about the flotilla, I said.

  Oh, said my dad, it wasn’t so bad. I liked watching the boats on the Thames.

  I think I might need to leave England, I said.

  We all laughed.

  That’s an extreme reaction, my mother said.

  I think I hate it here, I said.

  That was the third thing. In late September that year, I left London for Berlin.

  8

  How happy was I in Berlin? I was very happy. Or I believe I was, although when I reflect I do wonder whether my happiness seemed more acute because my time in Berlin came just before I moved to Brooklyn, like when you make a beam of light in a drawing by smudging thick lines of charcoal in the area surrounding it.

  If things had been different, people sometimes ask me, Would you have liked to stay in Berlin? and I say, I don’t know. I imagine that I would have, but that’s really just imagining. Because that is not what happened. Things were not different.

  In Berlin I lived on Helmholtzplatz. It was a square – a rectangle, really – named after a physicist, destroyed in the war, later a place where East German resisters would sometimes meet and make whispered plans, because unlike their apartments the Stasi had not wired it with bugs. But in 2012 Helmholtzplatz was just a park, with a play area for children, some gentle hills with itchy grass. Weatherproof concrete ping-pong tables that people played ping-pong on when the weather was nice, and which alcoholics used as surfaces for large beers and long naps when the weather was not.

  My apartment on Helmholtzplatz was in the back of a pre-war apartment building, through a courtyard, and it didn’t have a balcony, which people familiar with such matters informed me made it not such a good Berlin apartment. But I loved that apartment with my whole heart. It had whitewashed walls and wooden floorboards and high ceilings, and once I got the furniture that I needed to fill it, it was still rather empty.

  Once, early in my time there, a friend from university came to visit, she was passing through Berlin on her way to or from a conference, and she said: When are you going to get more furniture, Jean? and I said, What more furniture do I need? and she said, Yes, I see what you mean. This was the first time in my life that I owned any furniture at all. In London, for the most part, I’d lived in flats that rented complete with other people’s sagging mattresses and sofas. For the last year and a half of my time there I’d sublet the home of a woman who charged me a lower-than-low price for her beautiful little one-bed flat in Islington, but removed only a few of her possessions, so that I went to sleep each night under a giant print of a photo of Audrey Hepburn on one wall, and an equally giant print of Marilyn Monroe on the other. Now my Wohnung in Berlin was several rooms that were really my own, with my own pictures on the walls, and a coat rack I’d hung myself by the front door and which came crashing to the ground every time someone came over and hung their coat on it. Sorry! the person who was visiting would say, and I’d say, Don’t worry about it, and then I’d hang the coat rack up again and think: This place is really mine.

  The kitchen in my apartment on Helmholtzplatz was very small, a cupboard with a window, really, and in the morning I would make my breakfast – an egg fried in butter, dark rye toast with jam that I fried in a pan because I didn’t have a toaster. I drank black coffee that I made in a stovetop espresso pot that the last tenant had left behind, the kind that heats until the coffee erupts up into the pot like a surprise. I often overboiled it. While I ate my breakfast I’d watch the sun come up, and if it was still dark I’d watch the couple in the kitchen across the courtyard, two men making their own breakfasts: they drank smoothies, they often wore matching red tracksuits. The men across the courtyard were close enough that I would have noticed if they changed their morning routine, but far enough that if I met them on the street wearing anything but the tracksuits, I would not recognize them. In Berlin, my relationship with the couple in the tracksuits felt like exactly the amount of intimacy that I wanted to start my days.

  Sometimes I wondered if I would ever have a man in my kitchen in Berlin, someone for whom I would cook a second egg and a second piece of dark rye toast, but the truth is that when I was living in my apartment on Helmholtzplatz I was not really trying to meet any men, and that was part of what was making me happy. In Berlin, couples sleep in double beds but with their own separate single duvets, rather than sharing one, and when I went to IKEA with my friend Claudia I said: Claudia, should I buy another duvet, just in case? and Claudia said: You can wait until you need it. I never did. But most nights I felt perfectly cosy.

  Over nine years in London, quite a lot of men had hurt my feelings. The city was full of street corners that reminded me of bad partings, park benches where men had made me cry, restaurants where I’d gazed in candlelight at faces I now hoped I’d never see again. In Berlin, I had space. Or the space had nothing on me. Noch nicht.

  When I got a job offer in the summer of 2012 and the job was in Berlin I did not hesitate. My discontent with London had reached an all-time high post-flotilla. Earlier in the summer, my five-years-younger sister had married her boyfriend in Edinburgh. How do you feel about that, your younger sister getting married? people asked me when they heard the news, and I said: Fine! I would not want to marry her boyfriend! which everyone agreed was a good thing for me to not want to do.

  When Elspeth sent me a wedding invitation, it was addressed to Jean Hannah Edelstein And Guest, and she followed up by saying: You can invite anyone you like to come with you! And I said, I could have two And Guests if I feel like it, because our parents are paying for it! Which was maybe not a thing that a five-years-older sister who was totally fine with her younger sister getting married would say.

  I went without a date. And when our father gave a charming speech at their wedding, describing how my sister used to ride her small bike for hours in counterclockwise circles in the driveway, I wept: not so much because I was moved by his words, but because it was a few months after his lung-cancer diagnosis. His skin was broken out, a side effect of his chemotherapy, and I knew that he would not live long enough to give that kind of speech for me.

  When I applied for the job in Berlin, I thought: I probably won’t move to Berlin, but when I got the job I thought: I don’t have any reason not to move to Berlin.

  Some of my friends were dubious about my choice.

  Why Berlin? they said.

  Berlin is a place I have always wanted to live, ever since the first time I visited, I said, But I never thought I’d get a job there, because I don’t really speak German. This will be the best of both worlds: a great job where I can speak English, and also an opportunity for the kind of immersion that I need to finally learn to speak German properly!

  Do you really want to learn to speak German? said my friends.

  Of course I do! I said. I studied German in school for five years! I will become fluent and it will be really useful, as long as I continue living in Germany! And then the moment I leave it will become useless.

  OK, they said.

  In German, ‘Edelstein’ is an old
-fashioned word for a jewel, a diamond. In direct translation: noble stone. My German friends told me that it’s terribly cute, but it’s also like wearing a sign that says: I’m Jewish.

  When my brother visited Germany as a teenager, on a school exchange, he told me that he noticed a curious phenomenon. I thought it was a German thing to introduce yourself by stating your age, he said, to say, Ich bin Jürgen und ich bin eins-und-dreizig Jahre alt, but then when one of them insisted on shaking my hand because I was Jewish, I realized that they wanted me to know that they weren’t old enough to have been in the war.

  Did you explain? I said. Did you tell him that you weren’t actually Jewish?

  Yes, said my brother, I told him that my mother wasn’t Jewish, but he just looked at me and said, No, you are a Jew.

  One of my friends in London was married to a German man. On a night out before I left London, he leaned in close and cooed in my ear.

  You know, he said, so many Germans are going to want to have sex with you because your name is Edelstein!

  OK, I said.

  My interest was piqued.

  In German, I was very extreme, because I had a limited vocabulary and a strong personality. At the office we were given free German classes: it was a perk, along with unlimited bars of Ritter Sport chocolate, many days of vacation, a thousand euros to spend a year on going to the gym or learning to throw ceramic pots, to make us feel like we had a life beyond the blue-lit glow of our laptops. I was in one of the most advanced classes in the Berlin office because of my five years of school German, which was more than most non-Germans in the company had.

  Was ist Kunst? a page in my German textbook asked me, What is art? and I looked at the eight photographs, of paintings and street art and a pile of trash, and I announced to the room: Alles ist Kunst, Everything is art, because that way I wouldn’t have to say anything else.

  Wirklich? said my teacher, Really? Alles ist Kunst? and I nodded, as if my brevity was born from intellect rather than ignorance. Assembling a sentence of any further length was impossible: I understand a lot of German, but when it comes to speaking, my vocabulary is klein. My classmate laughed: she got me.