“Contemplations,” my personal favorite, collection of few dozen paragraph-length mini-stories, all enchanting. Favorites: “The Trees,” “The Next Village,” “Resolutions.”
Several agonizing days later, my breath caught in the back of my throat as the name Witold Romanoff appeared in my inbox, with a message composed in careful German, thanking me very much for my suggestions and saying that he would choose The Trial, because he happened to own it already. (Oh, how the tables had turned since 1993.) Would I, he wrote, like to get together and talk about it when he finished? Of course! I wrote back, while thinking God DAMMIT, man, why did you have to choose the longest and most difficult of all those things? “A Country Doctor” is six pages long! “The Trees” is THREE SENTENCES! We could be discussing it NOW! By the time you get through the interminable Lawyer-Manufacturer-Painter chapter it’s going to be 2010! Gah!
I had to think of something. Handsome, nice, well-adjusted, not-jerkish, not-pompous single male graduate students were rare enough at UC-Irvine that I’d spent all year there without running across one. (Not that I’d been looking. Heidegger was all the boyfriend I needed.) But still, hadn’t I already seen at least one other girl making a move? Possibly an undergraduate, who of course would lack my intellectual gravitas and life experience but in their place would have youth, which at the decrepit age of twenty-nine I sincerely believed I no longer possessed? It was entirely possible that by the time Witold finished The Trial, he could have impregnated that girl, and they’d be moved into family housing, and I’d see him pushing a stroller down the bike path and pretend not to know him.
What could I possibly have to offer Witold the hot logician with the weird name that an undergraduate girl did not? I did a quick scan around my room: Improperly hung black curtains to block out the merciless morning sun? Possibly. A minifridge full of hard cider and Becherovka, a spicy-sweet Czech liqueur that is supposed to cure all ailments? Maybe, but the undergrads probably had Jell-O shots in their minifridges, and also no cellulite. What did I have that could possibly override cellulite?
My eyes finally alighted upon a DVD of Triumph of the Will sitting on top of my TV, floor model tube set I’d talked the guy at Best Buy into selling me for fifty-two dollars. I’d seen Triumph of the Will before—or at least I’d convincingly pretended to—but I was supposed to watch it “again” as an assignment for my Violence and Modernism course. So, here was what I had to offer. Would anyone else, ever, think to ask someone on a first date to view the world’s most famous Nazi propaganda film, helmed by the world’s most famous person who never returned my fax? It was worth a shot. In the invitation I sent, I matter-of-factly included the sentence Hier ist meine Telefonnummer, like it was a business necessity and not a substantial overture, a feat made entirely possible by the majestic default officiousness of the German vernacular. (A pretty fair trade-off for Heideggerese, I supposed.)
And it worked! Witold called. Later that week, I dragged my friend Eileen away from her fifteenth reading of Johann Georg Hamann’s Aesthetica in nuce to come help me pick the perfect outfit for my nebulous maybe-date. (“Put down the ‘angel speak’ and come give me some ‘human speak’ about how to do my hair, please,” I implored.) We sat on the foot of my bed watching Law & Order and drinking hard pear cider from my minifridge; I figured I’d have one or two while I was waiting for the hot logician with the weird name to show, and then the two of us would clear out the rest of my stash while we heckled Nazis—and then we’d, you know, see what happened. By the time the doorbell of my prefab student apartment rang, I was a few ciders deep as I left Eileen in my room and elbowed my roommate and Elena out of the way to get to the door. (Wonderful women both, but third-date introductions for sure.)
As the door swung open, my slightly buzzed brain immediately began doing calculations: Clean shirt (yes). Scraggly week-old stubble (no). Came bringing something (yes). Came bringing a half-eaten bag of Trader Joe’s cookies (no). To be fair, said cookies were a special kind of chocolate-dipped macaroon only available at certain Southern California Trader Joe’s during the years of 2005–2008, and they were spectacular, but I didn’t know this yet. So when he said, quite gamely and cleverly, “I thought macaroons would be a good companion to Nazi propaganda,” because it was Jewish food, because he, like me, is part Jewish, I was so busy wondering why he didn’t like me enough to shave his face that I didn’t even appreciate the joke, and I forgot about the macaroons entirely.
I tried to beat back the tide of panic that was rising in my torso. Eileen was still in my room at this point, as per my instructions, so that it would be apparent that I was cool and popular and had many exciting engagements per evening from which to choose. “Hello,” she said, like a normal person.
“This is Eileen!” I interjected. “She’s in the German department with me. She is my friend. WE ARE FRIENDS.”
She gave me a duly impressed look as she showed herself out. All right, so not the effervescent demonstration of my popularity I’d hoped, but I still had one more armament in the Schuman arsenal of seduction: minifridge. “Can I offer you something to drink?” I asked.
“I’ll just take some water,” he said.
Oh, no. “Wait,” I said, “check out what I have, and then tell me if you just want water.”
I opened it with a flourish to show off my collection of hard ciders, Trader Joe’s brand Hefeweizen, Becherovka, vodka, and two Vitamin Waters.
“Really,” he said. “Water’s fine.”
Fuck. Had I misjudged the entire evening? Was he planning on chugging a perfunctory sip of agua and politely watching ten minutes of Heinrich Himmler prancing around out of politeness, before running off to go on his real date of the night? Because he was too nice to say nein outright to the Girl Who Reads Kant in German, with the big sad staring eyes and the gnarled wrist tendons? Was this a carpal tunnel syndrome pity date? I supposed there was only one way to find out. I at least had the wherewithal to switch to Vitamin Water, and I popped in the movie as Witold perused my bookshelf, removed his jacket (he’d been living in California long enough to wear a jacket outdoors at night, which I still refused to do), and made himself comfortable at the foot of my bed, which was the best and also only place to watch my television.
As the never-ending opening credits of Triumph des Willens played—twenty years after the World War … sixteen years after the beginning of German suffering … nineteen months after Germany’s rebirth—the pear cider wore off, and Witold and I slipped into conversation. Riefenstahl’s creepy masterpiece is, after all, dialogue-free for long stretches (unless you count the roar of seven hundred thousand people yelling Heil Hitler)—thus, although it was somewhat strange to have der Führer smiling creepily at his teenaged fans as a backdrop, the movie afforded plenty of opportunity for us to begin getting to know each other.
Witold had been born and raised in Brooklyn, the oldest child of Polish immigrants. His father was also named Witold. His parents had had sincere plans to name their firstborn son Michael, an unobtrusive American name that nobody would ever misspell or mispronounce. Once he was born, however, his father took one look at him, naked and covered in slime (Witold left out this part, but I think it’s important not to romanticize childbirth), and became so overcome with emotion that he decided to give the boy his own name, despite the playground taunts, butchering, and general onerousness that would surely follow. “I hated my name when I was a kid,” Witold said. “I went by Willy for all of middle school. Now that I’m an adult, though, I like it.” I liked it, too. We talked about everything in the world but graduate school: Disneyland (which he hated); the beach (which he loved); vegetarian food (which we both ate); this one bodega near the NYU campus that makes terrible sandwiches (which we both remembered); and the time that I was rearranging my bag on the subway platform to accommodate one of said terrible sandwiches and dropped my wallet right onto the tracks, and when I got it back I felt lucky but also kind of pissed because the sandwich had, of course, been awful. Bodega food was terrible, we agreed, but we missed every single one of those bodegas anyway, because there was nowhere in Irvine with any character. He mentioned the fact that Irvine left him feeling “dead inside” with such gentleness and good humor that I almost didn’t realize what he meant. I quickly forgot that we weren’t drinking—in fact, I quickly forgot about everything, including my Kramer-style neighbor Elena, who poked her sweaty head in around 1:00 A.M. to tell us to “keep it down.” This was not because we were being loud, but because our regular-volume conversation was drowning out the voices in her head.
I excused myself to the bathroom and beckoned her to follow so she would not be left alone with Witold to find out that he studied the philosophy of math, and thus would ostensibly want to hear all about her dissertation plans, which involved Henri Bergson and “like, fractals and stuff; I don’t know, the math shit will be easy, I’ll figure it out later.”
“You’ve got to cool it down in there,” she said as I washed my hands.
“Get your mind out of the gutter! We’re just talking.”
“No,” she said. “I mean you’re laughing, like, way too much and way too hard. I can hear it from my apartment. It sounds really overeager. Like, be cool, Rebecca. Be cool.”
I splashed some water on my face. “First off,” I said, “I’m not cool, so I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression. And also, this happens to be what I sound like when I’m happy. Which probably seems unusual because you’ve never heard it before.”
By the time Witold left with a chaste hug, it managed not to send me into paroxysms of insecurity because it was four in the morning, and I figured that even the nicest Polish New Yorkers with weird names would probably find reason to extricate themselves from a hellish garbage nightmare situation before the break of day, if they so desired. After he walked out the door, I noticed that he’d left that light California jacket by my bookshelf. Score! A George Costanza–type leave-behind. We’d even talked about Seinfeld, so, obvious. I had no choice but to e-mail him to arrange a handoff, which then facilitated the procurement of a second date—this time to view my second-favorite documentary, Hell House, which is about a conservative evangelical church’s haunted house of sin. This date involved no alcohol whatsoever, also ended at four in the morning, and didn’t end in a hug.
For those next few months in 2006, which then turned into years that spooled out after 2006 like so much sun-baked Orange County asphalt, Witold and I ended up having quite a few small adventures with each other, sometimes even setting out into the dread OC on purpose: to the Borat movie at the mall we called “the Speculum,” where it took us half an hour to find a parking space and I was just happy to spend the time with him; to an Indian restaurant in Tustin where the food was so spicy that I had a beet-red face for two days afterward; on a series of increasingly subversive walks in our unwalkable neighborhood, one of which had us scrambling along for an hour in a drainage ditch; on a road trip to Los Angeles on a gloriously clear day, where we sat in the garden of the Getty Museum talking for so long that the guard had to come kick us out; to many mornings and afternoons spent on the beach, some even in the frigid, terrifying water, where he demonstrated how to jump into the waves head-on so that they couldn’t smash me down on the sand (he’d learned that, of course, the hard way).
By March of my second year of grad school, I was no longer scared by Martin Heidegger or admitting I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and Witold and I had been going out for almost a year, so I was also no longer scared that nobody would ever love me again. And then, my family experienced a sudden and traumatic event—an Ereignis, if you will. My grandfather drowned in a canoeing accident. On the surface, if you hear someone explain that her ninety-four-year-old grandpa just passed away, it doesn’t sound shocking—but the grandpa in your mind’s eye is not my grandpa, who still went canoeing every day, who built entire tree houses in an hour, whose bare adoration of his grandchildren could power a small train. Every kid thinks her grandpa is immortal, but it’s rare that a thirty-year-old adult believes this to be so with such tenacity—because her grandfather, who has survived Nazis, and heart disease, and even an unfortunate dalliance with two-week-old corned beef, goddamned near was immortal. Before I had to leave for a three-day trip to Chicago for the funeral, Witold drove us to the beach and sat with me while I looked out on the water and thought about drowning, with his arm around me, staring out at those waves.
As he dropped me off at the airport later, he told me he admired what he called my “stubborn insistence” on facing my grief directly. When I returned, he picked me up, and we drove home as the setting sun turned the sky a vibrant purplish pink. I was exhausted from sadness, from so many grieving Schumans in one place, and from withstanding the mind-bogglingly tone-deaf insistence of my cousin’s asshole husband that we get together again someday when I wasn’t “so stressed out.” (“I am not stressed out,” I told that fucker. “My grandfather just died. I’m sad.”) As we drove on, and the sky and the burnt desert hills around us grew brighter and then darker, I began to feel the first stirrings of relief, of knowledge that yes, my immortal grandpa was dead and it had ripped a gaping and permanent hole into my family, but somehow, with enough care and gentleness from the people who loved me, old and new, I would be all right eventually. “I don’t know what it is,” Witold said, as we stopped at a traffic light, “but these past months I’ve been feeling a lot more alive.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I know what you mean.”
We drove in silence for two more stoplights—so, it being Orange County, three more miles—and watched the sky soften together.
It was, I thought but didn’t say aloud, a moment of pure human joy, just coming into view.
9.
Schadenfreude
n. malicious happiness, from damage and joy.
ex. You could say I should have seen all this coming, but that would be unnecessarily schadenfroh. (And I’ve heard it all before.)
The Schumans are big cremators, but if I buck tradition and get a tombstone, I’d like it to have on it nothing but my name and a line of Kafka’s “A Little Fable,” which is a tiny story about a mouse who gets stuck in a maze. “Alas,” the mouse says, “the world gets smaller every day.” At first she was relieved when she saw walls appear in the distance. “But,” she continues, “these long walls closed in so fast that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.”
Then, a surprise: the story’s most important character—lurking the whole time, unbeknownst to all of us—appears and changes the game entirely, furnishing me with my epitaph:
“You’ve simply got to run the other direction,” said the cat, and ate it.
Rest in peace, me.
I think that last line is meant to be funny, but I fully expect all who visit my interred remains to think it’s stern and somber, and to leave the cemetery with at best a new insight into futility and mortality, and, if I’m lucky, a full-blown existential crisis.
Speaking of graves, and cemeteries, and cities where the dead outnumber the living two to one, I spent my penultimate year of graduate school in Vienna, Austria, crown jewel of Central Europe—Zentralfriedhof corpse pop. 3 million; living pop. 1.7 million. I was there on a Fulbright grant, as a “fellow” at a lovely cultural studies institute where I attended a lot of lectures by Austrians who talked way too quickly, and got unlimited free room-temperature mineral water. My other activities during the year were staring awkwardly into my webcam at Witold back in the U.S., where he had a non-tenure-track job teaching philosophy in St. Louis; riding the tram; shuffling mournfully around perfectly preserved old neighborhoods; getting jacked up on six-euro cups of coffee; being depressed in the birthplace of psychoanalysis; and pecking away at my dissertation on Wittgenstein and Kafka. At the end of the year, I gave a forty-five-minute talk on my research in carefully enunciated German, then braced myself for a Q&A courtesy of the city’s notoriously literate and grumpy populace. It turns out my most perplexing query was from the director of the cultural-studies institute, Herr Boltzmann, who, after I illustrated part of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with that “Little Fable,” insisted that he’d never heard the story with that last sentence before. “Are you sure it doesn’t just end with ‘you’ve got to change direction’? Are you entirely, entirely sure?”
