Leonie, I soon found out, claimed severe allergies to many common irritants, including cigarette smoke (except, funnily enough, when she was out at any bar, Kaffeehaus, or club), which she also happened to loathe (100 percent correctly, of course). But for some reason, in the Loftschloss she’d been outvoted by Paul, Johannes, and now me (implicitly; it was clear that I would not be getting a full Loftschloss vote anytime soon). Thereafter, despite her vomit-related protestations, a cloud of airborne nicotine hovered at all times near our twelve-foot ceilings. The smoke snuck into the far corners of the oddly sunny “west wing” (Westflügel), which was currently one massive Pergo-floored room, but would soon house all five of the other Loftschlossers in quasi-separate dwellings they built themselves. It permeated the dark-blue industrial carpeting that covered the “east wing” (Ostflügel), the half of the loft designated as the living room, and peeked beyond the thick black fabric that served as my wall.
That first night in the Castle, after what sounded to me like a German Edward Albee play, Leonie and Paul seemed to reconcile (the détente involved “[something something] window [something]”), and Andreas, Anke, and their tipsy fetus were loosed into the Berlin night, with assistance from Paul and his giant cartoon key. I crawled back into my toasty corner and smiled myself to sleep at how quickly your life can change, if you just follow the right jean jackets through the streets in the middle of the night. I was going to be so cool for living there.
The next morning, however, was no time to be cool. It was, instead, time for manual labor, which I quickly realized came with the terms of my nonexistent lease. The task ahead, of questionable legality, was the self-administered renovation of the west wing, which was to be divided into a kitchen and three bedrooms: one Einzelzimmer (single room) each for Detlef and Rolf—who, I learned near-immediately, were never home—and a massive triple at the wing’s far end, which Johannes, Paul, and Leonie would share. That wing had been in a state of mid-division the very day I moved in, so my true introduction to the loft and its inhabitants—and to speaking German all day long and finally slipping uncomfortably into fluency—coincided with a crash course in interior renovations.
“Rebecca!” Leonie yelled at me from atop a ladder I was steadying, after definitely not enough coffee. “Gib’ mir den Akkubohrer!”
“The what?”
“Akku … bohrer.”
I held up a hammer. “Das?”
“Nein. AKKU. BOHRER.”
I held up a bucket of half-mixed plaster. “Das?”
Finally, Leonie clambered down from the ladder I’d been holding up with not a small amount of brute force, stomped around me, grabbed a cordless screwdriver, muttered “Nutzlos,” and then huffed her way back up the ladder. Akku means “rechargeable battery”; Bohrer means, literally, “screwer” (heh). Not a word that had been on my vocab lists in German 102, 202, or 310, but I certainly knew it now.
Ludwig Wittgenstein uses a construction site as an example of language learning in the Philosophical Investigations—the boss says, “Bring me a board!” and the analphabetic assistant learns what a board is through petty tyranny. Wittgenstein castigates us for believing, wrongly, that this method of language learning (“ostension”) is how we learn our native tongue (because, he points out, in order to understand the gesture for “this is a board,” we have to understand what “this is” means, and thus in order to learn language we already have to understand how language works). But it is, he admits, a working (albeit clunky) method of second language learning, and it is basically how I functioned as building apprentice at the Loftschloss, learning the words for crossbeam, nail gun, and socket wrench by being prompted to do things with them, and then accordingly shamed until I figured out what word I’d never heard before went with what object I had never used before.
As a second-language teacher, Leonie left a bit to be desired.
“Your German, übrigens—which means ‘by the way,’” she told me a few mornings into my apprenticeship (switching into barely accented English for “by the way”), as I held a wall panel in place while she stuffed old copies of the Zweite Hand into it as insulation—“is even worse today than usual.”
Leonie was always, in fact, the first to point out a misconjugated verb, a misgendered noun, a trailing off midsentence because my language was too simple to express a complicated opinion.
“I really can’t emphasize enough,” she continued, “how bad you are at German.” There is a certain kind of German who truly believes she is “helping” the second-language learner by quickly pointing out all of her mistakes before she can finish an utterance—the Sprachpolizei, the language police—and what they really “help” me do is become abjectly terrified to say a single goddamned word, for fear that if I do, it will be my incorrectness, rather than the content of what I am trying to say, that is communicated.
“It doesn’t matter what I say to Leonie,” I said that night to Diane, over one-mark shots of watered-down tequila, at a café about two hundred paces away from the Schloss that ran a special Thursday-night promotion on watered-down tequila. “All she hears—all I feel like anyone hears—is ich bin fremd. I am foreign. Ich bin fremd, ich bin fremd, ich bin fremd.”
“Why don’t you just tell her to Verpiss dich?” she asked. “That means ‘fuck off,’ and she’ll be impressed with your fluency.”
The worst thing about being an intermediate second-language speaker around critical people is that when they criticize your language abilities, it feels like they are also criticizing your intellect; in mocking your clunky construction of a thought, they seem to believe that you really think that way all the time.
“You must have had terrible grades in German class in school,” Leonie said about a week into the renovation, as both of us began smearing plaster on the wall of what would soon be Detlef’s room. “Your teachers must have been very frustrated with you.”
“Well,” I said, glooping my plaster around in a figure-eight, “they didn’t have a chance. I didn’t study German in school.”
“Wie bitte?”
“I did Spanish in school,” I said. “And I was the best in the class, actually.” Finally, a moment when my host country’s tendency toward bluntness would pay off. “I began German at the start of university,” I said. “Which was”—I stopped to count—“two and a half years ago.”
Leonie stopped mid-dunk into the plaster bucket.
“Really?” she asked. “Well, then.”
She’d assumed that American children, like German children, begin foreign languages—plural!—in about the third grade. She’d assumed that we are a nation of monolingual idiots because we are impervious to our years of instruction, when we are, on the contrary, a nation of monolingual idiots because of institutionalized ethnocentricity and xenophobia, and near-total lack of instruction altogether.
“For two and a half years,” she said, “you’re actually not so terrible.”
Although that was high praise, my general sensitivity toward criticism of any sort, combined with my specific antipathy toward Leonie herself, meant that I spent my first month in the Loftschloss attempting to prove that I was smart, while simultaneously saying as little as possible. Contrary to the way I have spent every other minute of my life, hours went by when I uttered nothing at all, as I helped convert the loft from an industrial space into a residence—for which, mind you, it was not even close to properly zoned (they had a “corporation” running out of it, something to do with Johannes and Paul’s computer work). As Leonie reminded me every single day, were the landlady, Frau Richter-Schmitt, to do a pop-by unannounced, at no point was I to admit that I lived there and paid rent. This also meant that in no way was I allowed to anmelden, or register my address with the police, which meant, in turn, that I would be unable to obtain the student visa that I had been strictly instructed to get. Not only was I living in an illegal residence, I was also living there illegally. (Back then, however, there was a loophole in the law—as long as you left the Bundesrepublik before your three-month tourist visa ran out, you could just come right back in for another ninety days. All that mattered was that little passport stamp from the Czech Republic or Poland, both of which were a few hours away by train.)
I’m not being fair to Leonie here, by the way. She wasn’t a villain. She actually felt pretty neutral about me, and simply enjoyed giving me grief, which the Germans describe using the unsavory word verarschen, which literally means “to assify (someone).” She was also just really German. (A real Wessi, I would have said about six weeks earlier.) What I would call, in my wishy-washy American way, different preferences for how to do something inconsequential—knotting a scarf, opening a window, plunging a French press, eating cheese—many of the Germans I’ve met would recognize as grievous misdeeds against humanity, requiring the swift performance of a public service, namely both noticing the transgression and bringing it emphatically to my attention. If I protested that their constant criticism (they would call it “help”) hurt my feelings, Germans would respond that the ridiculous delicacy of those feelings is simply another fault that needs to be addressed immediately.
Once when Leonie thought I was either asleep or gone, I overheard her talking to Paul at the table. “Rebecca’s so quiet,” she said.
“No, she’s not,” he said. “She’s just afraid of you.”
“Nonsense,” she said.
I waited until she’d left to tiptoe out into the living room, where I saw that she’d doodled in her notebook, in huge letters, the following directive:
ICH VERBIETE REBECCA, MICH ZU FÜRCHTEN.
(I forbid Rebecca to be afraid of me.)
To be fair to all other Germans, plenty of them are substantially more laid-back about the way other people do things than Leonie was, and not just Ossis such as Paul, who was so lackadaisical about washing dishes that he protested when Leonie reminded him to rinse, a rare moment in which she and I were aligned. (“Bah!” he’d said. “It’s not necessary!”) By far the most easygoing resident of the Loftschloss was Johannes, he of the Punky Brewster jeans, busted front tooth, Lucky Strikes, and giant wild mane. He and Leonie were best friends, which only made sense, because they were polar opposites, and if you averaged them out, you got a normal person. He was skinny as a two-by-four and she was curvaceous (though a far, far measure from dick, or “fat,” which is how her flatmates inexplicably described her). His hair inhabited its own zip code; her head was shaved (possibly in homage to Judith Butler). He was vegetarian like me—yes, German vegetarians exist—and she ate like a regular person. And where her personality was as rough as the sandpapery toilet tissue in every restroom in the Federal Republic, his was as soft and gentle as a tiny baby lamb. And that is why, when Leonie declared to the rest of the house that erecting slightly more permanent walls in the corner of the living room, to make the sixth bedroom (my room) into an actual room, was “lowest possible priority”—while looking me right in the eyes—Johannes insisted we raise those walls as soon as Detlef’s plaster was dry. He was protecting me from her. And so obviously I fell in love with him immediately.
The nascent stages of our relationship were kept ambiguous through a clever switch-out of German dative prepositions, which every beginning German student knows are the easiest to remember because they can be sung to the tune of the “Blue Danube” waltz. The night after he and Paul finally hung my walls up (as Leonie popped bubble wrap passive-aggressively in the other room), we went out to Milchbar to celebrate. I drank a few glasses of Aventinus, a special beer that wasn’t easy to find and was famous because it had the same alcohol content as wine. As it did every night at Milchbar, Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” came on the stereo, and, as transpired every night at Milchbar, every single German in attendance broke from their silent smoking (or impassioned debates about the Green Party) to sing along full voice with Iggy and David Bowie during that chorus of Las.
“Come on,” Johannes said to me as I was midway through my final Aventinus slug. And out we went under the bright and hollow sky. As we rounded the corner of Oranienstraße, I knew the moment was right. (At any rate, I’d had enough beer.) I grabbed Johannes by his skintight yellow trousers (he called them his Wertherhose, after the outfit Werther wears in Goethe’s novella for the lovelorn). I pinned him against the grimy wall of a crumbling building and stared up at his frizzy blond halo.
“You’re beautiful,” he said in English (he’d attended an American school in Korea and spoke fluently). “Don’t do all that makeup shit.”
This was highly debatable: I was at the time sporting a bleached-white buzz cut, the result of boredom, Leonie’s clippers, and very strong German box dye, and it made me look like the spitting image of Mike D from the Beastie Boys. Nevertheless, I humored Johannes and wiped off my Chanel Metallic Vamp lipstick and we kissed, a study-abroad cliché come to glorious life, illuminated by the streetlights, jolted through with the buzz of a not-insubstantial amount of alcohol and the frenetic city around us. OPERATION FIND GERMAN BOYFRIEND: CHECK! Hooray! Now I’d get fluent in the language for sure.
Our coupling was hastened when we came home to find an immovable passed-out rando in Johannes’s bed—somebody was always crashing at the Loftschloss on no notice—and Johannes had no choice but to traverse back to the east wing and bunk with me. The next morning, after our relationship had been consummated (and during which I learned that Gummi, the German slang for “condom,” is disturbingly similar to Kaugummi, “chewing gum”), Johannes took it upon himself to read Leonie the riot act about the bed-interloper.
