This Really Isn't About You

by Jean Hannah Edelstein

  Our teacher, who was earnest, did not. She frowned. Sehr extreme, the teacher said, Very extreme. Genau, I said, Indeed, with the shrug of a confident extremist, because one of the first things I learned when I moved to Berlin was that you can say Genau in response to most statements. Genau imparts an air of certainty that can bring a dignified end to a conversation whether or not you’re sure what it is that you’re Genau-ing about.

  This is how you got an apartment in Berlin: you found a place on the internet and then you went along at a designated hour when you looked at the apartment alongside maybe a dozen or perhaps fifty other people who were looking at the apartment. You thought about whether you could envision the apartment without the fifty other people in it, and in that envisioning, whether the apartment seemed nice. Then you filled out a long application form and hoped that the person deciding who will get to live in the apartment liked your form the best, maybe because of your wonderful handwriting or, as Claudia told me, if you wrote a cover letter full of moving personal details.

  I went to see an apartment in Helmholtzplatz on a Tuesday afternoon soon after I arrived in Berlin, and it seemed pretty perfect.

  Entschuldigung, I said to the broker, in halting German, Excuse me, this apartment want I.

  Fill out the form, the broker said.

  OK, I said, friend mine help me out fill form. I don’t good German speak.

  Well, said the broker, he is already filling out the form so he is going to get the apartment.

  He gestured at a man who was filling out the form with the confident flourish of someone who understands the dative case.

  OK, I said, I will my friend take have the form away to help.

  Genau, said the broker. Well, you can write down your name and phone number on this piece of paper and maybe I’ll call you.

  I wrote down my name and phone number.

  Tschüss! I said to no one really at all. But then, as I walked down the corridor, I heard footsteps behind me. The broker.

  EDELSTEIN! he said. That is a wonderful name.

  Thank you, I said.

  So beautiful, the broker said, beaming at me through the front door of the apartment. Such a special name!

  Danke, I said again.

  It’s not British, said the broker. It’s really, really German.

  Genau, I said.

  It’s so special! said the broker. Where is your family from? WHERE IS YOUR FAMILY FROM?

  WHAT DID YOUR FAMILY DO IN THE WAR? I wanted to say, but instead I said: America. My family is American.

  Edelstein! he said again. So special!

  I smiled an uncomfortable smile as I clattered down the stairs.

  I went home. Claudia helped me fill out the form and we submitted it to the broker with a letter full of moving personal details about my journey to Berlin, written by Claudia in its entirety.

  The next day, she called the broker to find out about the apartment.

  Jeani, she said, later on, I called the broker and it was extraordinary! He said that you can’t have the apartment, it is already gone, but then he said, ‘I have a special apartment for the special Edelstein.’ So if you want it, you can have the apartment below the one you saw. He won’t even put it on the market.

  Genau, I said.

  I was not lonely living on Helmholtzplatz. Claudia lived just around the corner, with her boyfriend Mirko. I called it The Platz, and they thought this was very funny, because it was bad Gerglish, but soon they called it that, too, at least when they were hanging out with me. Claudia and Mirko were why I had chosen to live on The Platz, so that Claudia and I could do things like drink coffee in the cafe on the ground floor of my building in the morning before we rode our bikes to work, or meet after work to drink Riesling in the charming bar on the Platz’s south-east corner, which was called Liebling, which means ‘darling’, and which was exactly that.

  I was not lonely, but unlike in London, where my evenings and weekends were stacked with social engagements, in Berlin I was often alone. I did not have the internet in my apartment in Berlin. This was because I didn’t speak German well enough to talk to the internet installation customer-service people, rather than because I was a worthy intellectual who was too good for the internet at home. But it did mean that in the evenings when I went back to The Platz after work I couldn’t call anyone on Skype or watch television. Sometimes I looked at my phone and sometimes I read books. Sometimes I worked on my writing. Sometimes I ate mango yoghurt from a jar and sometimes I sat listening to music on my phone and knitting a scarf that had no end.

  When I was alone on weekends, I went out in the neighbourhood, or to a park, or swimming in a lake. I learned to cast my bikini off in best German naturist tradition and then panicked when the bottoms ended up buried deep in the murky silt. In Berlin my life felt quiet because I chose to make it so: because I did not know very many people, and because I did not understand German well enough to overhear passers-by unless I listened to them closely. For the most part, I chose not to. I relished the peace of my ignorance.

  I had a beautiful bicycle named Judith. Judith was manufactured in Hungary and was solid and black and slow, with wire baskets in the front and in the rear. I parked Judith in the courtyard of my building and most mornings I would ride Judith to the office and it was very charming, even though I had to ride for some time out of the neighbourhood over cobblestones that made Judith judder and my breasts shake up and down in my bra. I never wore a helmet when I rode Judith because that was not a thing that was generally done in Berlin.

  On one particular morning in January I set out extra early, riding Judith to work. It was a perfect January morning: cold in a way that is befitting of January but warm enough to wear a winter coat and scarf and ride a bike. As I pedalled along I watched the neighbourhood come to life. People pushing their children in prams to their government-subsidized childcare. Business owners putting out folding chalkboards in front of their shops and restaurants. People wearing chunky knits with blankets wrapped around their knees drinking coffee and eating Brötchen at sidewalk cafes. If outside a Backerei a schnauzer had been standing in a nice sweater, playing a traditional German folk song on an accordion, I would not have been surprised.

  This is so charming, I thought to myself as I cycled past these scenes. It’s like I am living in a film, a charming film about my own life.

  I crossed the road and left the cobblestones and started riding my bike down the bike lane on Kastianallee, a more serious and high-traffic Allee, down a hill towards Rosenthaler Platz. The wind blew in my face and then all of a sudden I felt something clunk on my head.

  Fuck! I thought to myself, I think someone just threw something at me.

  When I lived in London, this was not unusual: to ride my bike through a neighbourhood where women riding bikes were not entirely welcome, to be pelted with water balloons or eggs, trash heaved from a car window.

  There are quite a lot of people in London who are assholes.

  But there was something kind of sharp about the thing that the person threw at me as I rode down this hill in Berlin, and then I looked up and I saw that it was a bird and it had used my head as a helipad, taken a little pause on the top of my skull and taken off again.

  The bird had ugly black feet. I watched it fly away and I tried not to fall off my bike and I did the only reasonable thing there is to do when you are reacting to a bird landing on your head while you are cycling down a hill: I screamed. I screamed and screamed all the way down to the corner, about five hundred metres or so, and then I pulled over and stood on the sidewalk and I laughed for about five minutes, doubled over my handlebars, tears streaking down my face. I’m sure that some of the passing-by Germans who were on their own charming commutes found me a little bit alarming.

  That was how happy I was in Berlin.

  It was the end of May in 2013 when my father’s doctor started saying some of the things that doctors say in films, or in television series about hospitals where all of
the doctors are having sex with each other. Phrases that are such a recognizable part of cancer narratives that when someone says them in real life you might wonder, for a moment, if they’re really being said. You might wonder if you’re on camera. I wished that I was.

  You’ll want to organize your affairs, I was told the doctor had said to my father, and that she’d also said: Now would be a good time to do any travelling that you’d like to do.

  Because I did not speak German well enough to talk to the internet installation customer-service people, I discussed these things that the doctor had said to our father on a Skype call with Arthur at the end of a work day, when I was still in the office. My brother was at home in California, nine time zones behind. He had called the doctor himself, to hear these phrases directly. I was not brave enough to do this. I needed him to be the conduit, to filter. I was sitting in a meeting room that was constructed from three pieces of glass and one solid wall. I sat with my back to the solid wall, as if that point of view would make me less vulnerable.

  My brother and I discussed the implication of the phrases without saying the word that they implied.

  What do you think I should do? I said to Arthur.

  His wife was about to give birth to their second son. Our sister was living in Aberdeen in north-east Scotland with her husband. They had jobs at a university and were renovating a house.

  You should probably move home, said my brother. Could you move to Baltimore? Or Washington, DC?

  In another era, I thought, or in a Jane Austen novel, I would be the spinster aunt, the eldest daughter doomed to always be alone in favour of looking after ageing parents.

  No, I said to Arthur, I’m not going to move to Baltimore. But, I said, I could get my job to move me to New York. That way I’d be much closer, three hours on the train away instead of a many-hour flight.

  That sounds like a good idea, my brother said.

  It had never felt so hard before to leave a place. I loved Berlin. My one-way flight left early in the morning in late December. I used the local taxi app to call a cab at six o’clock in the morning. The day and night before I’d said goodbye to my friends, sent them away with my unwanted kitchen utensils, sat on the living-room floor and eaten a final falafel from the shop downstairs. On that final morning, in the cold and dark, I left the apartment, dragged my exploding duffel bags down three flights of stairs and across the courtyard of the building where I’d lived for a year, and paused in the graffiti-covered entryway.

  The square was pitch dark and silent, but I looked around, just in case, for police. Out of my coat pocket I pulled a black Sharpie that I’d bought at a stationery shop the day before, for an express purpose. Amongst the multitude of scrawled and sprayed tags, I wrote my initials: JHE. I drew a heart after them. The taxi arrived. I got in.

  Tegel, bitte, I said.

  Wo ist dein Mann? the driver asked me: Where is your husband?

  Nein, I said. Ich habe kein Mann.

  But your husband called the taxi, the driver continued, auf Deutsch. Your husband, Jean. He used the app.

  He pronounced my name as if I was a French man.

  Nein, I said, kein Mann. Nein. Nichts. Genau.

  It was too early in the morning to laugh.

  Later I realized that the reason I left Berlin was to feel like I was doing something constructive in response to my father’s diagnosis: I realized it a few weeks later when it became clear that my great dramatic act, my decision to cease my years of free living, had done nothing to reverse the course of the cancer. Of course it hadn’t. But that didn’t mean that in my subconscious, I had not tried.

  I had never before felt anything but excited to leave a place that had become my home.

  AFTER

  1

  In Baltimore, after my father died, in the weeks and months that followed, time disappeared, but also dragged. I was either in Baltimore or I was in Brooklyn. Sometimes I was on the train that goes between Penn Station in New York and Penn Station in Baltimore. I spent a thousand dollars on train tickets, or something like that. I chose not to do the math.

  No matter the time of day, on every trip south I ate a toasted pumpernickel bagel spread with cream cheese. I bought the bagels from the deli in the bowels of New York Penn Station where I used to buy Dad’s black-and-white cookies. On every trip north I ate peeled hardboiled eggs that came twinned in a plastic packet that burped a little bit of salt water when I opened it. I bought the eggs from the deli in Baltimore Penn Station, which was the only place to buy food besides a Dunkin’ Donuts. This deli also had a bar, a desperate one. Each time I bought the eggs I thought: Should I also have a beer?

  I never did. Which meant that when I took my eggs to go, I felt like I’d accomplished something. I felt like things could have been worse.

  I had come back to America after fourteen years away, I was thirty-two years old, I was alone, and I was supposed to be building a new life in New York. But I wasn’t trying very hard. All that late winter and early spring, after my father died but before my own diagnosis, most of what I knew in that country, my country, was a blur of trains and grief. At work, a consultant was brought in to help my team and to me she said: Tell your boss that you’re ready to be back in the game! and I nodded as if I was. But I was just going to work to pay for my train tickets.

  How long do you get to be sad about your father? I had no idea. In the office, I sat at my desk and re-read his obituary on the website of the Baltimore Sun.

  When I was in Baltimore, my mother and I drank a lot of tea. I still didn’t really like it, but I drank all that tea with my mother not for flavour, but for feeling.

  Do you want a cup of tea? my mother would say, as soon as I arrived off the train from New York City, or when we got back to the house after going out to run an errand, or just in that stretch of afternoon between lunch and dinner. Before my father died I would often say: No, thank you, to the offer of tea. But after he died I would quite often say: Yes.

  When I lived in England I drank a lot of tea, many cups a day, even though I didn’t like it. I learned quite fast after I arrived in London that drinking tea was an important way to connect with people: when I went over to their homes, or if we worked together in an office. Being offered a cup of tea meant that you were being offered an entry to something, and accepting it was important.

  I drank so much tea in London that I came to believe that I didn’t mind the taste. I allowed my teeth to get a little yellow. But in Berlin, where it was not often offered, I’d realized that I wasn’t that fond of tea, at least not when served according to the British custom. If I had a cup of tea after lunchtime it would almost always make me lie awake in bed until two or three a.m. But after my father died I almost always wanted tea with my mother, even if I just held the cup or sat next to it until it grew cold. Because making a cup of tea was a thing, under the circumstances, that my mother could do for me, or that I could do for her. It filled a space. It passed some time.

  We drank the tea from mugs with various motifs that tracked the life of our family: decorated with logos from physics conferences, universities we’d attended, vacation spots we’d seen. We sat in the family room at the back of the house in Baltimore, and I always sat on the sofa, dark green with a small red print. My mother would sit across the room, in the reclining armchair that my father had spent so much time in, in the weeks and months before he died. The chair was also dark green, with a small red print, but if you looked close, the chair and the sofa did not match. My parents were not perfectionists. It’s impossible to know what made their marriage work, of course, even as a witness to so many years of it, because what can any of us really know about a relationship that is not our own? But maybe their forgiving natures, their acceptance of good-enough upholstery, were among the things that made it possible for them to love each other so long and so much and so well.

  I’ve made a decision, my mother said, from the reclining armchair. It was quite some time, and many cups of t
ea, since Dad had died, when she said this. In the initial days after his death, my mother kept repeating the advice that she’d been given by various people with recent knowledge of grief, people who’d lost their partners. They told her not to make any decisions too quickly, to wait a year before making a dramatic change. But now some time had passed and my mother was ready.

  Oh? I said. Yes, my mother said, I’m moving back to Scotland. OK, I said. (What! I thought, I literally just left my life in Europe to be close you. LI-TE-RALLY.)

  I’m sorry, my mother said.

  It’s OK, I said, I understand.

  I did understand. I understood because my mother wanted to be near one of her children: of the three of us, my sister was the most settled.

  I get it, I said, I would love you to move to Brooklyn, but I can’t promise to be there in the long run.

  I know, said my mother.

  I also understood in a way that was harder to quantify, I suppose because I had grown up in America with my mother, and because throughout that young life my mother often referred to America as ‘this country’. ‘In this country’, she said. It was not her country. My mother moved to America before I was born but did not become an American citizen until I was twenty.

  When my mother told me that she was going to move back to the country where she was from, I also understood because I knew what it was to be a woman on my own and to do that.

  Do you want to move back to Berlin? my boss asked me again, the first time I spoke to him after my father died.

  We did not always get along, that boss and I, but he had worked hard to help me get back to America. He’d lost his father, too. No, no, I said, I’m glad to be here, in America.

  My boss was not the first person to ask. Will you go back to Berlin? friends said, and I said, No, and sometimes I said: I feel sorry for my siblings, that they had to leave, to go back to their lives.