“Verloren?” She snorted. “Wie ist das nur möglich?” (“Lost? How is that even possible?”)
“Well,” I said, “I had it, and now I don’t.”
“Gibt’s doch gar nicht,” she said, which means “I can’t believe it,” but literally means “That doesn’t exist at all.” The Metropol club literally did not have a protocol for lost coat-check tickets, because literally nobody had ever done it before in the history of the Metropol club.
The ideal situation would have been simply not to tell any Germans what had happened, go straight to the U.S. embassy, and wait for four hours to get a replacement passport, with nobody to see my transgression but a fellow American witness (to swear under oath about my citizenship), and a giant smiling portrait of Bill Clinton. But that wasn’t possible, because German offices—even the American embassy—go dead to the world beginning about 2:00 P.M. on Fridays (and on every made-up-sounding holiday in the Gregorian calendar). I had no way of rectifying the situation until at least Monday—when, of course, I would be required to present said passport as identification at the DaF exam I wouldn’t be able to find and would certainly not pass. For the entire weekend, I was a stateless person, dependent upon the kindness of strangers, or at any rate having to borrow money from a bemused Gertrud, as soon as she was able to wrap her mind conceptually around such a bizarre and unthinkable act as the one I had committed.
“What do you mean you lost your passport?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “curiously, what I mean is that I had it, and now I don’t.”
“Gibt’s doch gar nicht.”
On Monday, I showed up to language class ready to beg someone to come spend the day with me at the embassy (and lend me two hundred marks)—only to find a genuine Deutsche Post snail-mail letter addressed to me, care of the study-abroad office, in German handwriting:
Esteemed Frau Schuman
On the night of 25 February 1997 you left your handbag on the S3 train. I recovered it and brought it home. You may telephone me and set up an appointment to come retrieve it between the hours of three and five in the afternoon on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Regards
Fr Helga Haider
Although exceptions certainly exist, when a German finds something that doesn’t belong to him—even if that something is a wallet, with credit cards and a passport and cash—he methodically and calmly tracks down the original owner and returns it, cash included. That’s not to say that Americans are inveterate found-wallet thieves—I once managed to drop my wallet onto the New York City subway tracks, and it was recovered by an MTA worker who dutifully went through every business card in it until he found someone who could call me. But when I finally shuffled to the Union Square police station to recover my possessions, the forty dollars or so in cash was understandably gone, and I didn’t even care, because any cash in a found wallet is due reward for the finder. It’s the American way.
What blew my pomade-crusted little head off about the whole debacle was how unsurprised every German I told about it was. “Of course someone found it,” they all said. “Of course she’s returning it to you.” Natürlich!
“It was very stupid of you to leave your purse on the train like that,” said Frau Helga, when I finally worked up enough courage to telephone her. “Very, very, very stupid.”
“Danke schön,” I said.
“You really shouldn’t have done that. You’re lucky I found it. It’s a purse, I told myself when I saw it. A purse! Who leaves a purse sitting around? What a stupid thing to do.”
“Jawohl,” I said. “Danke schön.”
“And then I saw that you were an American exchange student, of all things! Do Americans often just leave their purses on the train?”
“Danke,” I said. “Vielen, vielen Dank.”
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.
