our heads.
Miles’s name didn’t come up when Holly first started talking about going abroad for her master’s thesis. She saw opportunities in West Germany. We both knew we would always associate Montreal with our friend’s death. The thought of leaving grew stronger as we both began to see that this city would always hold that memory. He was everywhere we looked, in the streets, the cafés, in that small apartment the three of us had shared. He was a shadow we needed to outrun.
At night when I got home from teaching, I’d find Holly reading and curled up on the couch in her pajamas, with a pencil and an open notepad on the coffee table. As I threw together something to eat she’d read aloud in German. I understood nothing at all of that language, but I listened, in love with her voice and the expressions that moved over her face, and often wondered when the time would come when our friend would finally move off and leave us alone together.
• • •
We flew to West Berlin in the fall of 1987 and lived in a small apartment on the fourth floor of a five-story walk-up. The window in our living room looked down on the narrow street. There was a student bar down there, and every morning I saw a little round lady in a blue frock and Adidas running shoes sweeping the sidewalk out front. We went in there at night and watched the crowds of students and drank beer from enormous bottles. At each table there seemed to be a subject of great importance under discussion. The young men wore Palestinian scarves wrapped around their necks and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and handed around flyers that called attention to their favorite causes.
Finally, after a few weeks, we were waved over to join one of these roundtables and provide the North American perspective. Eager faces leaned forward, but I had no positions or arguments on the matters at hand. I couldn’t talk about the arms race. I held no firm notions on the Sandinistas or the PLO or the Solidarity Movement in Poland’s dockyards. I was unable to stake a claim on one side or the other. It wasn’t indifference that bogged me down but an appreciation of the baffling complexity. Always present in my mind, if never clearly discernible, were the strands of truth and the limitless contingencies that spun out from the centre of whatever issue lay before us. At the heart of certainty there was danger, ideology, blindness. One evening I attempted to share this interpretation with three students who quickly pointed out the moralcowardice of such an approach and drew parallels to Swiss neutrality and the complacency of the German citizenry in the lead-up to the war. I tried to articulate my position but was not invited to participate again.
Holly spent her days up at the university working on her thesis. Her adviser was a serious old gentleman from Dresden named Schreiber, who taught a course on modern German philosophy. She introduced us on a foggy afternoon in November.
“You are an English teacher at a record company here?” he said.
“That’s right,” I said.
A few weeks after we arrived, I’d been taken on by a small language academy that had contracts with a number of large corporations. One of them was a multinational recording company. After two weeks one of my students, the ranking executive, pulled me aside and proposed that we dump the middleman. He paid less money, and I made more.
“And do you like Berlin?” Holly’s professor asked. His bottom lip was quivering slightly, and he held a battered old briefcase in his right hand. He was probably close to seventy years old.
“It’s an exciting city,” I said. “Sure, I do.”
“Berlin is the new Galápagos,” he said. “It is an island populated by a fascinating new species of German.”
I fell in love with the way Germans spoke to me in my own tongue. There was an almost total absence of idioms and clichés in the English I heard there, and they couldn’t rely on partially formed
Miles’s name didn’t come up when Holly first started talking about going abroad for her master’s thesis. She saw opportunities in West Germany. We both knew we would always associate Montreal with our friend’s death. The thought of leaving grew stronger as we both began to see that this city would always hold that memory. He was everywhere we looked, in the streets, the cafés, in that small apartment the three of us had shared. He was a shadow we needed to outrun.
At night when I got home from teaching, I’d find Holly reading and curled up on the couch in her pajamas, with a pencil and an open notepad on the coffee table. As I threw together something to eat she’d read aloud in German. I understood nothing at all of that language, but I listened, in love with her voice and the expressions that moved over her face, and often wondered when the time would come when our friend would finally move off and leave us alone together.
• • •
We flew to West Berlin in the fall of 1987 and lived in a small apartment on the fourth floor of a five-story walk-up. The window in our living room looked down on the narrow street. There was a student bar down there, and every morning I saw a little round lady in a blue frock and Adidas running shoes sweeping the sidewalk out front. We went in there at night and watched the crowds of students and drank beer from enormous bottles. At each table there seemed to be a subject of great importance under discussion. The young men wore Palestinian scarves wrapped around their necks and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and handed around flyers that called attention to their favorite causes.
Finally, after a few weeks, we were waved over to join one of these roundtables and provide the North American perspective. Eager faces leaned forward, but I had no positions or arguments on the matters at hand. I couldn’t talk about the arms race. I held no firm notions on the Sandinistas or the PLO or the Solidarity Movement in Poland’s dockyards. I was unable to stake a claim on one side or the other. It wasn’t indifference that bogged me down but an appreciation of the baffling complexity. Always present in my mind, if never clearly discernible, were the strands of truth and the limitless contingencies that spun out from the centre of whatever issue lay before us. At the heart of certainty there was danger, ideology, blindness. One evening I attempted to share this interpretation with three students who quickly pointed out the moralcowardice of such an approach and drew parallels to Swiss neutrality and the complacency of the German citizenry in the lead-up to the war. I tried to articulate my position but was not invited to participate again.
Holly spent her days up at the university working on her thesis. Her adviser was a serious old gentleman from Dresden named Schreiber, who taught a course on modern German philosophy. She introduced us on a foggy afternoon in November.
“You are an English teacher at a record company here?” he said.
“That’s right,” I said.
A few weeks after we arrived, I’d been taken on by a small language academy that had contracts with a number of large corporations. One of them was a multinational recording company. After two weeks one of my students, the ranking executive, pulled me aside and proposed that we dump the middleman. He paid less money, and I made more.
“And do you like Berlin?” Holly’s professor asked. His bottom lip was quivering slightly, and he held a battered old briefcase in his right hand. He was probably close to seventy years old.
“It’s an exciting city,” I said. “Sure, I do.”
“Berlin is the new Galápagos,” he said. “It is an island populated by a fascinating new species of German.”
I fell in love with the way Germans spoke to me in my own tongue. There was an almost total absence of idioms and clichés in the English I heard there, and they couldn’t rely on partially formed
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