To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Travel Oct. 22, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/travel/wlust/1999/10/22/germany My boyfriend in jackboots I'm Jewish; Peter wasn't. Our summer reunion in Germany took me places I didn't want to know. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Lauren Fox I was thinking mostly about love. Throughout the entire long flight, whether I was reading or talking to the woman next to me or resting, I was thinking mostly of love, of 10 long months apart and the sweet specifics of our coming reunion. Hands and arms and shoulders and lips, fingertips like feathers. Steamy kisses in the airport. The delicious heat of summer after a long, long winter. By the time I got off the plane, I was practically swooning. Only marginally was I thinking about Nazis. The subjects had been sharing space in my mind for some time. This trip was, after all, more than a visit to a long-distance lover. It was a homecoming, of sorts, except I had to catch myself every time I wanted to say that: You can't return to a place you have never been. Still, there it was. Peter had been studying in Germany for the year, and I, daughter and granddaughter of German Jews, was, as an acquaintance put it, "returning to the motherland." They left in May 1938, when my mother was almost 2. If they had waited six months more, they wouldn't have been able to get out. My grandmother's brother and parents stayed behind. Her brother, my great uncle Hans, was arrested and taken to Dachau, and released a half-year later. The woman who sat next to me on the airplane was originally from Germany, returning for a while to look after her sick mother. She took good care of me: got me an extra blanket, told me to drink lots of water on the plane. She offered me her dessert and patted my hand when we hit turbulence. And she told me what to expect on my first trip to Germany: too many foreigners. And not, if you know what I mean, the good kind. She had nothing against them, of course, it's just that they don't work, only sit in cafes all day. Germany, she confided, is becoming a melting pot. Full of dark-skinned people, speaking strange languages. As we flew over the ocean I worried that I wouldn't recognize Peter. What if he were as foreign to me and as frightening as the place he'd been living? What if I scanned the crowd (the impossibly blond crowd, I imagined) for his face and he was nowhere, until the stranger in front of me touched my arm and said, "Lauren, it's me! I'm right here!" And what if I still didn't recognize him? Of course, I spotted him immediately, recognized in a blink the shape of his body, the way he raked his fingers through his hair. It was the reunion itself that I couldn't have predicted: the way we should have moved together like magnets and instead smiled awkwardly, hugged like there was someone standing between us. The minute I saw him I felt as if he'd betrayed me by being here, by being happy here, and a cold sadness burrowed into my body. In the airport in Frankfurt, where I looked around and felt immediately like making unfunny jokes about German efficiency, it was my own foreignness that took me by surprise. I remembered so much German. Sentences flew out of my mouth before I even thought them; phrases like bright, surprising birds fluttered to me from nowhere, bold and unexpected. I have no idea how to say, "It's warm outside" in German, or even, "I'd like to change some money, please." But I can say "Cauliflower" and "Stop that silliness, you bad thing" and "Give me a kiss, little one." I fell asleep nights to the familiar sounds of German in my head, a language that, when spoken by certain voices and in specific tones, will always remind me of home. Will always feel safe. Will always smell warm, like a kitchen. Peter spoke flawless German. Peter, who isn't Jewish, who lived in Germany that year and at other times in his life, spoke flawless German. And wherever we went, people were amazed that he was American, that my blue-eyed boyfriend was not, in fact, German. Sometimes, in the car, he would get annoyed with other drivers and snap at them, or at me, in German. It was a reflex after living there for a year, I suppose, as unplanned as my response to it: visceral horror, fear of this language yelled. I found myself pinned to the seat after these bursts of irritation, immobile. "Don't shout at me in German," I said, embarrassed by the power of my reaction. "Don't shout at me, Nazi-boy." Laughing at the absurdity of it. And, of course, Peter translated for me. He helped me order food in restaurants, communicated with the doctor when I needed an antibiotic, pointed out interesting pieces of information I would have missed. Like the Judengasse -- the Jewish Alley. We were in Rothenburg, a small Bavarian city that, unlike most of the rest of Germany, has been untouched by war because of the wall that surrounds it. Rothenburg was an unplanned detour, an excuse to get out of the car after a long day of driving and a wrong turn and a fight. It was late, 11 p.m., and the city was relatively deserted. We wandered, relieved, through its narrow streets, gentle with each other in the tentative maintenance of love. Both of us surprised by the thick tangles of it, by the strength of the webbing between two people who, we were slowly, belatedly realizing, might not belong together. Here, outside, there was more space, at least, for things unspoken to hang in the air between us. The houses in the Judengasse are closer together than those in the rest of the town, and shabbier, more cramped. People live there today, only they are not ghetto Jews, of course, just German people going about their daily lives. We could hear their voices float through open windows, laughter and the bumps and murmurs of movement as they settled in, prepared for bed. We could have been on any street. I ran my hands along old stone, tiptoed into somebody's dilapidated courtyard -- three crumbling walls, grass growing through the cracks -- and wondered if it used to be the synagogue. There are no Jews there, and no ghosts, either; no echoes, no voices, although I strained to hear them. I wanted something, comfort or impossible reassurance or just the presence of absence, more than a polished town and an incongruous street name, someone to whisper, "Yes, we were here." I wanted at least to hear voices as we walked holding hands down the street that is still called the Judengasse. Peter and I traveled across the country. I looked at people and tried not to think, Where were you? What are you teaching your children? But I walked through the streets of Germany and looked at people and I wondered, and wondered, and wondered. Heads together, laughing, we renamed rock groups: Guns 'n' Moses, The Shtetl People. Sang in the car. Were sweet to each other. And fought. We sucked everything we could from one another, drank each other dry. Argued about everything we could think of -- directions, routes, what time to stop for coffee, where to go next, whether to keep the windows up or down. We picked fights, picked the scabs of our relationship till they bled. But once when we were walking down a steep, rocky path I tripped and cut a deep gash in my knee. He took the bottle of mineral water from his backpack, knelt at my feet and poured the water so gently over my bleeding wound that it was almost absolution, almost forgiveness. We pulled the last threads of our love taut, frayed, almost broken. One moment we would be lovers, wandering German streets; then out of the corner of my eye I would see evil old men in black armbands. The depth of my anger surprised me. It breathed. We would split up, finally, when we got back to the States. Sometimes on our travels, because we had no money and because, at the time, it was an adventure, Peter and I would sleep in the car. We'd pull into a farmer's cultivated field late at night, when we knew he wouldn't be back, and we'd leave just after the first wash of morning light eased us awake. We'd have to find a gas station in town in the morning so I could put in my contact lenses. In the car, in the middle of the blurry German night, curled up in an uncomfortable ball in the vinyl seats that only partially reclined, this is what I thought: I trust him enough to protect me here, in the place where my fears are outsized, and older than I am. But the one who protects can never fully understand the danger. Maybe this is the unbridgeable gap. Maybe this accounts for our arguing and clawing at each other after 10 months apart, maybe this is the thing between us. Or maybe it's just me, overwhelmed by this place, saturated with anger and sadness, everything in my path a symbol or a reminder, or both. True, I considered, it's probably not the most reasonable situation to be in, a girl obsessed with her family history dating a Teutonic German-ophile. It's a lesson, I guessed: If you can't stop imagining your boyfriend in jackboots, it may be a signal that something's amiss. I thought, at 23, in the middle of the German night, that I'd probably be single forever. - - - - - - - - - - - - I liked taking the subway alone, back in Frankfurt. It wasn't difficult, but I felt as though I were accomplishing something every time I did, listening for the names in the proper order, deciphering a language that is not my own, getting somewhere. I had to concentrate so hard, count the stops and listen so closely, I almost didn't notice the man in front of me one day, the man with the black hair streaked with gray and the numbers tattooed on his arm. I wanted to grab onto that man, to call out, to make him turn around and look at me. I wanted him to see me, to recognize a connection. I wanted him to say, "Yes, you will understand, and I will tell you ..." And then perhaps we would share a beer while he reminisced about the good old days? There are things I will never know, gaps that are also unbridgeable for me. I've heard Germans -- good people; ethical, thoughtful people -- say that they don't want to continue to carry the burden of the Holocaust, that they've paid the price and won't suffer the sins of their parents any longer. They would tell me I Go Too Far, tell me it's Enough Already, it was 50 years ago, 50 years. And maybe they would be right. But I'd say this, too: 50 years is a puff of smoke, a whisper, the flutter of wings before flight. Perhaps I'd be a better person if I'd found in myself an understanding, even a sort of forgiveness, there in the place that wasn't home. If I could have found reconciliation, made it somewhere to rest my mind. Then maybe I wouldn't continue to feel this way, as if I'm wrestling with a demon so many people would like to let sleep; as if I'm angry, full of bitterness and bile; as if I'm the crazy one. It's one of my last nights in Frankfurt, cool and clear after a week of 95-degree heat, and the city is holding its annual fair. We go to it late with some of Peter's friends from school: Stefan, Gabi and Silke. They all speak English, so communication is easy; we like each other and I feel, after only a short time with them, as if I belong. It's always strange, though: I'm the Jew, a curiosity to Germans my age who have grown up inundated with their own history in this, their own country, but who have, for the most part, never met a real live one. We know, and never say, that our grandparents could have been neighbors, friends, something else. Anything. A kind of guilt steeps so huge, so much bigger than we are that, like air, we can almost ignore it. They tread lightly with me, look a little too long, leave palpable spaces. We're all slightly giddy at the fair. Relieved from the week's thick heat; light, finally, we whirl with the energy of it, bouncing off each other, off everyone around us. We go on every ride, sucked in like children to the blinking lights and the wind and the screams, laughing. The Ferris wheel, they tell me, is the biggest in Germany. From the top, they say, you can see all of Frankfurt. We share a gondola, the five of us, and Peter and I sit close. The blunt sadness that has hung between us these weeks is growing sharper now; the slow end of something once -- still -- sweet. I've felt near to what is raw and essential here, in Germany, to a kernel of myself and my history that will always, no matter what I do or who I become, define me. The link between my grandparents, my mother, me, is as fragile and as strong as a spider web. As close as I feel to it now, I know, as the Ferris wheel slowly climbs, that their experience will be only, always my history -- a continent away from memory. We rise above Frankfurt and it's true, the whole city spreads out in lights beneath us. At the top I notice for the first time the pink entrance tickets that carpet the fair grounds, as if these environmentally conscious Germans have given themselves a night to litter, to let somebody else clean up the mess. Peter and his friends point out neighborhoods and buildings to me in a fast litany and I look past their outstretched arms -- there, and there, and there. Someone grabs the metal wheel in the middle of our gondola and starts us spinning around as we rise and fall. Soon we're all working it, five pairs of hands turning the gondola faster and faster, our own mini-ride inside the Ferris wheel. I'm drunk with dizziness and wind, pressed up against Peter, and, for a moment, there is nothing else. Pink tickets litter the ground like feathers and we are high above the city, high above Frankfurt, spinning. salon.com | Oct. 22, 1999