Frau Helga eventually gave me directions to her apartment and implored me to come recover my possessions as soon as possible, and I obeyed. Her building was a sooty concrete number in an even more distant part-of Prenzlauer Berg than Gertrud’s. The place was substantially larger than ours, with an actual living room and an actual sofa, upon which the plump, mercifully slow-talking Helga welcomed me to sit, and upon which my purse waited for me—with, unsurprisingly, all of its contents, down to the pfennig. Everything in the apartment kind of matched my vintage purse, since it had easily been there since 1962. The furniture, the tchotchkes, even (especially) the tin of wafer cookies Helga graciously served me were aged; I didn’t nibble on them so much as gnaw. It occurred to me that Helga, living alone as she did, probably didn’t entertain much, and I wondered with a bit of sadness how long that tin of cookies had been waiting for company.

“So,” Helga said, “was machen Sie hier?”

“I have come in order to pick up my purse,” I said.

“No,” she said, “I mean here in Berlin?”

“I am a student of German literature at the FU.”

“That’s nice,” said Helga. “I don’t like to read.”

“Ja,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“Your German is very good,” she said. Aw. I liked her.

I studied her face as she sipped her coffee out of a tiny, delicate cup. She was ruddy and small-eyed, not graceful but definitely resolute. I looked down as I sipped my own coffee, then realized she was studying me, too.

“Sie sind so schön,” she said. (“You’re so beautiful.”)

I ventured an awkward Danke and clawed my coffee cup in one hand and the Lucite handle of the purse in the other.

“When you’re beautiful, life is easier for you,” she mused, which brought another underwhelming Ja from me.

“I was never beautiful,” she said, “and I had a hard life.”

I wanted to know: How hard, and why? Hard in what way? I thought it would be rude to ask, though—and I also didn’t know how to say “in what way” yet. So instead I just looked at the nicely framed picture of a teenage girl that Helga had placed on her mantel.

“Meine Tochter,” she said, following my eyes. (“My daughter.”) “She wasn’t beautiful, either.”

This also wasn’t a lie—Gertrud was right about Germans’ bluntness, and I really could have asked Helga about the difficulty of her life and she wouldn’t have found it offensive—but I just couldn’t bring myself to say to this sweet old lady, Yes, your daughter is really unattractive. Even though I guess it was true, at least in that photo, which showed a young woman, about eighteen or nineteen, with squinty eyes, a bulbous nose, squishy cheeks, and an unfortunately prominent snaggletooth. As I mulled the linguistic nuance that would have enabled me to say something palliative (she had, for example, very nice hair), I realized that Helga had used the past tense about her daughter. Meine Tochter war nicht schön. My daughter wasn’t beautiful.

Only then did I start to notice that gazing at me from every available surface in the apartment was the same picture of the girl, which looked like a standard-issue class portrait, likely from her last year of school. It dawned on me, as Helga talked and I understood about a third of what she said, that when there is a framed picture of a girl on the mantel and that same picture embroidered on a pillow, and indeed all the pictures of that girl stop at a certain age, that girl is dead. And she was. And it was awful.

“An accident,” Helga explained. The daughter, with the homely face and the hard life, had been killed in the early eighties. Helga didn’t have any other children. As I did my best to chew her wafers and gulp down her coffee, she looked at me like she wanted to swallow me whole, a grief-stricken witch to my poorly comprehending Gretel. I don’t know if I would have been able to say the right thing to her even if I’d been a native speaker of German. In my present state it was hopeless. I looked at her and nodded solemnly with a mouthful of wafer.

“But you,” she said. “You’re so beautiful and you’re still so young.”

“Danke,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else.

Eventually the conversation turned to something that didn’t make me want to hurtle myself face-first into a river of my own tears: die Mauer, the Wall, as in, nostalgia for. The veritable ease of life for the beautiful, and whether or not I belonged to that demographic, and the anguish of grieving one’s own child—those would have been beyond my meager, self-absorbed little skill set even if I’d been able to sustain a conversation. But the relentless encroachment of crass Western capitalism into the helpless Eastern districts, and its veritable steamrolling of the elderly population, which was just minding its own damn business—this I could get behind. I perked up immediately. “Everything’s so different now,” Helga said, “with the Mauer gone.”

Nod.

“Worse.”

Another vigorous nod.

And then: “There’s black people everywhere now.”

Oh boy.

I froze and one of those infernal wafer cookies, never making good progress to begin with, lodged itself in the back of my mouth. Not particularly loquacious before, I was now rendered 100 percent mute. My experience with blatant American racists (as opposed to the passive-aggressive or dog-whistle kind we all know and probably don’t love) was limited to my maternal grandfather, who used the n-word in front of me once before my mom read him the riot act. And my German acquaintances were limited to progressive-minded younger people. What I would soon find out from my program directors upon relating this anecdote, though, was that the Frau Helgas of the former East were not anomalous, and their sentiments unfortunately extended to some of their grandchildren, who had taken up with neo-Nazis. For several years after reunification, in fact, the Berlin guide books warned Jews and people of color to avoid the more remote eastern districts altogether, for fear of violence against “foreigners.”

All of my insistence about the superiority of the East was suddenly threatened: They might not be keen on yelling at me for walking in the wrong direction on the sidewalk, but were they racist? Because even someone as self-absorbed as I was knew that was worse. One of the many unfortunate side effects of the Eastern Bloc’s isolation was a near-total lack of immigration from any noncommunist country. The West, on the other hand, had instituted a “guest worker” program after the war, which had brought in a massive influx of cheap labor from Turkey and North Africa. This program was, of course, exploitative—but at least it meant that folks in Düsseldorf, Cologne, West Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich had at least seen a person of color before 1990.

In 1997, despite the confusion of my Jewish grandpa—himself the son of a man who’d escaped from pogroms on foot at the age of eight, bribing the guards at the Polish border to fire their guns into the air and deliberately miss (basically the Jewish emigration tariff of 1884)—as to why I’d want to devote my undergraduate years to German Studies and set foot in the Fatherland to begin with, and indeed, despite my own selectively Jewish righteousness and insistence that everyone around me feel guilty all the time, there were still more neo-Nazis in my own Fatherland than there were in Germany. But what neo-Nazis there were lived in my precious East Berlin and fed off the xenophobia and fear engendered by five decades of communism, fomenting the very resistance to reunification that I had found it so charming to adopt.

I finally managed to swallow my wafer cookie, washed down with the last of the now-tepid coffee. “Once again,” I said, cradling my purse safe in my lap like a little baby, “I thank you so much. But now I must be going.”

“Of course,” said Helga. “But be careful out there. It’s dark now, and this neighborhood—it’s terrible. You’ll walk an entire block without seeing a German anywhere.” (Including, of course, myself.)

I took one last glance at the needlepoint pillow of Helga’s daughter and let the heavy door of her apartment shut behind me. I heard three locks click as I shuffled down the pitch-black hallway, fumbling for the thirty-second-long light switch I knew was somewhere.

6.

Wohngemeinschaft

n. apartment share, abbr. WG, from dwelling and community.

ex. Triangular room in WG for illegal sublet, DM 300. Near transportation and entertainment. Electricity, hot water, ceiling-swing, some cigarettes, cultural metamorphosis, unlimited petty tyranny incl.

Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop.

The German landline issued its disconcerting monotone beep as I held my breath on the other end of the receiver. It was my worst exchange-student nightmare: calling a German stranger unsolicited; failing to be understood—or, worse, being sure that the German stranger was silently deriding my language abilities. Please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up. A rather counterproductive prayer, to be sure, as one doesn’t find a new place to live by letting the phone ring, hanging up, and then talking to nobody. On the fifth or six boooooop, a sharp voice answered.

Come on, Schuman, I told myself. Sei tapfer! Be brave! There was no way I was getting stuck out in the Freie Universität dorms, twenty-five miles from anything interesting, with only a bunch of dorko international students to keep me company in my dingy complex that was basically prison with beer. What the fuck was I going to do out there? Study? All the cool kids in my program had taken our possibly misguided directors’ offer to refund our dorm fees and search for housing independently in correspondingly cool Berlin WGs (Wohngemeinschaften, literally “living communities,” the German name for an apartment shared with someone who isn’t one’s family). And since I already lived in a WG with Gertrud, I couldn’t be expected to stop now and be subjected to such indignities as rules and not being cool. What the fuck use was living in the coolest city in the world, at its second-coolest time in its history (after Weimar, natürlich), if I wasn’t going to be cool? This was a potential tragedy. Too bad the only way to find a WG was to step directly into the gaping Nietzschean abyss of terror that was subjecting random potential roommates to my halting, phlegm-filled telephone Deutsch. This I did by answering ads placed in the Zweite Hand, a free weekly that was like Craigslist, but in print and with slightly fewer dick pics.

“Hallo? Halloooooooo?” repeated the voice on the other end, perturbed at my twenty seconds of heavy-breathing silence. My throat had once again coated itself as an immediate reaction to any attempt to speak German with anyone. I finally managed to croak out the single sentence that I’d been practicing under my breath all day: “Ist das Zimmer noch frei?” (“Is the room still available?”)

The voice at the other end paused, but not because he didn’t understand what I said.

“Äh … nein. Nicht mehr. Tut mir leid.” (“No. Not anymore. Sorry.”)

I assumed he paused because he was attempting to process someone being so terrifically rude. Germans are in some situations a direct people: as Gertrud was so kind to point out, they will think nothing of telling you that you have gained weight. But in other situations, they have ironclad laws of politeness. One of these is that when telephoning a stranger, you are expected to give your entire curriculum vitae as your initial greeting. This I learned the hard way, after Gertrud overheard me have one of my doomed conversations and set me straight. The sole acceptable manner in which to announce myself on the other end of a telephone when answering an advertisement for a vacant room from the Zweite Hand rivaled a passage out of Robert Musil’s two-thousand-page novel The Man Without Qualities: Hallo, guten Tag. Mein Name ist Rebecca Schuman, und ich bin Austauschstudentin aus den USA. Ich habe Ihre Anzeige in der Zweiten Hand gelesen, und ich wollte wissen, ob das Zimmer noch frei ist. I wrote it out and practiced it two hundred times in front of the mirror.

For my troubles, I managed to book exactly two viewings of available rooms within my monthly rent budget of three hundred deutsche marks (the rough equivalent, at the time, of $175), a price point at which the pickings were slim to none, and Slim had just walked out the Tür. Furthermore, any place that was available to the likes of me was nightmarish, such as the austere room (with yet another coal oven) in Friedrichshain, where the proprietor was a mopey schlub in his late thirties who insisted that anyone who moved in had to hang out with him.

“So,” I said, when he wouldn’t stop staring at me, “what do you do?”

“Ich bin Arbeitslos,” he said. (“I’m unemployed.”) “Und was machst du denn in Berlin?” he asked. (“What do you do in Berlin, anyway?”)

I told him I was a student of German literature at the FU, which at this point was almost true—language class was over, the FU semester was imminent, and I was even mildly excited to choose between a course on Bertolt Brecht and one on Weimar modernism. Brecht plays were morally instructive and short (bonus), but Weimar modernism included the excellent paintings of Otto Dix, who specialized in the Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, in which Dix deliberately made pretty people ugly and grotesque, when he wasn’t drawing worms crawling out of the skulls littering the battle sites of the First World War. Another substantial selling point of Dix’s paintings was that I didn’t have to look any words up to read them.

“Ach so,” said Herr Sad-Sack. “What authors do you like?”

“I am a great admirer of Franz Kafka,” I said.