I arrived at Frankfurt International on January 1, 1977. It wasn't the first time I'd been to Germany. Mother, Steve (5) and I (2) sailed from New York to Bremerhaven in November 1947 to join my father, who had been assigned to the Constabulary, the post-war US occupation force. We lived in Puchdorf, Weiden, Augsburg, Stuttgart and Frankfurt and returned, the four of us, in June 1950. So I had two and a half years for Germany to sink into my consciousness, including a lot of contact with the natives in the form of "househelpers" (Gertrude and Johanna, Karl and Walter). Maybe that early imprinting had something to do with me ending up with Germany as my adopted home and country. But there is a much better explanation. Her name is Vee.
I took the train to Kassel and was met by Hans Petersen, the linguistics professor who had hired me. I stayed with him and his wife Hella in their home in Speele, a small village on the Fulda about 20 kilometers outside of Kassel, just down the road from the golf club that Vee and I would join many years later. I stayed with Hans and Hella for a week, until I found an apartment in Kassel.
My degree was in linguistics, too, but I had been hired as a Lektor, a "mere" language teacher. I was overqualified for the job, with a Ph.D., but I was getting used to that. Since graduating from Cornell in 1973 I had taught Spanish at a college in Louisiana, English as a foreign language in Tehran, and worked as a sales rep for a New York publisher, none of which had anything to do with linguistics. The job paid well, though, and I was glad to get it.
When classes started again after the Christmas break, Hans took me to his classes to meet the students. The students were mostly women, all planning to become primary or secondary school English teachers. They were a frumpy bunch, except for Vee, with her long blond hair and red fingernails and lipstick, wearing snug white jeans with an enigmatic butt-patch proclaiming “World’s People Love My Symbol,” although there was no symbol.
The English level of the students was high, since they had all had 7-9 years of English in school. Hans set them loose on me, asking me questions. Most were innocuous enough. But just before the end of the hour, one of the male students, Dieter Noll, wanted to know what I thought about "American imperialism.”
I wasn't prepared for that. My antiwar protest days were long gone, and so was my interest in politics. American imperialism? I hadn't thought about it. It wasn't even a thing for me then. "Nothing" would have been an honest answer. But the cat had my tongue.
Vee saw that I was uncomfortable and came to my rescue.
“What should we call you, by the way?” she asked.
Miraculously, I not only regained the power of speech but rose to the occasion.
“‘Dr. Morrissey’ is fine,” I said. I didn’t know that the students were used to using first names with the lecturers, who were usually not much older than they were. Vee was 27. I was 31.
“... or ‘Michael,’” I continued. "Or ‘Mike.’”
Vee still seemed taken aback by my response.
"Actually," I said, "you can call me anything you want to, as long as you call me.”
Cool!
Vee remembers it differently. She says I didn’t come across as cool at all, but as a rather puzzling combination of extreme arrogance and extreme timidity. A walking oxymoron?
“Like a little boy lost,” as she puts it.
Nevertheless, she called me. I didn’t have a phone, but at the bus stop a couple of days later in front of my apartment, she stopped to offer me a ride. Leaning one arm over the steering wheel of her mother’s little Fiat 500, she aimed a red-tipped forefinger at me and curled it, as if pulling the trigger at a duck in a shooting gallery.
“Do you need a ride?” she asked me when I walked over to the car.
I was one dead duck. Did I need a ride? Does a duck need water?
But I wasn't dead, just stunned. That a woman like her would be interested in me! She was beautiful, smart, and what my father would have called a Type A personality. I seem to be more the Omega type. She is Libra, I am Aquarius, Metal Tiger and Fire Dog, depending on your zodiac. Vee believes in this stuff more than I do, but I have to admit that what I've read seems pretty accurate. We're a good match -- even if people who have witnessed our quarrels might beg to differ.
Over the next few months we got to know each other, and I forgot about going back to the States and going to law school. (I had been accepted at Florida State in Tallahassee.) I became a student of German law instead, because Vee knew (as I said, she is smart) about the federal labor law that requires employers to offer permanent contracts after a 6-month trial period (Probezeit) unless they can prove that the job is indeed temporary. In the case of foreign lecturers hired to teach languages, the universities were generally violating this law by limiting contracts to one or two years, thereby saving the state a lot of money that would otherwise have to be paid for longevity salary increments and pensions.
There had been a couple of successful suits by lecturers for permanent contracts in other states (Länder), but mine was the first in Hesse. We won in the first Instanz (municipal court), then in the second (state level), which set a precedent, and several of my colleagues then did the same. This did not make me popular with the German professors in my department, who (unlike in the US) all had permanent contracts but liked having "fresh blood" in the ranks of the foreign language teachers every few years. The argument that this was necessary for the job, however, made no sense linguistically, and Vee and I worked hard to help our lawyer make this clear.
Ten years later, in 1987, we spent the Easter vacation driving around the south of France, including Aix-en-Provence, where I had lived during my "junior year abroad" (which turned out to be about half a junior year abroad) in 1965-66) and Saintes Maries de la Mer. Maren was still in her horsey stage (11) and wanted to see the famous wild horses of the Camargue.
I had been to Saintes Maries, too, during my stay in France. I was sharing an apartment in Aix with Hélène and Barbara, and David and Armand had the apartment across the hall. We were all students, more or less, Hélène and I more less than more. David and Armand were Moroccan Jews, Armand pre-law and David wanted to become a film director. Barbara was a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, also doing her junior year abroad.
In the spring Hélène, Barbara, David and I decided to hitchhike to Saintes-Maries, because none of us had been there, and I think it was also clear that Hélène was hoping to run into Otto, who had left Aix some months earlier. Saintes Maries was known as an artist colony as well as for its wild horses.
Otto was a classical guitarist specializing in Bach, and according to his reputation, in seducing the female student population of Aix. I had seen him often, a tall, swarthy German with a chin beard, holding court at Le Mistral, a popular bar on the Cours Mirabeau. Hélène invited him to dinner one night. She and I had had a little fling but it was over by then. She introduced him to Barbara and me as “Otto,” which in French sounds like “auto,” so in a rash attempt at humor I quipped, “Otto, comme automobile?’”
Otto was not amused. “It’s a charming name,” he growled, in perfect English.
"Oh, it certainly is," I hastened to agree. I had not meant to insult him. Or had I?
He was a taciturn type, and said almost nothing during the meal. Afterward he and Hélène disappeared into her bedroom. Otto had brought his guitar along, and I had never heard him play, so I didn't want to miss the performance -- the musical one, that is.
Barbara warned me not to, but I knocked on the door anyway, opened it and poked my head in.
“Mind if I join you?” I inquired.
Otto was sitting on the edge of the bed, with Hélène beside him and guitar in hand. When I opened the door, he packed up his guitar and left without a word. Hélène was furious.
So when Hélène, Barbara, David and I made our little excursion there a few weeks later, I was not crazy about the prospect of running into Otto again. Fortunately it didn't happen, and we all went back to Aix, said our goodbyes at the end of the semester and never saw each other again.
Until 1987.
As Vee, Maren and I drove slowly down the main street in Saintes Maries looking for a hotel, I spotted a kiosk in front of the Chambre de Commerce announcing a guitar concert that evening.
From that moment on I had a strange feeling in my gut, as if I had heard the distant whistle of a train that somehow I knew was coming in, and I was the station.
We found a hotel, had dinner, and left Maren in the room with her books and cassettes. We walked back to the Chamber of Commerce and I found a list of concert dates in the lobby. One of them showed Otto Riem as the performing artist a few weeks earlier, playing Bach. I had never known his last name, but this had to be him. I had just missed him. I could finally have heard him play! The train whistled again. It was getting closer.
We found seats up front in the small auditorium. Just as the performance was about to start I became aware of a jeans-clad knee poking into the right rear corner of my field of vision. I turned around. One quick glance told me it was, indeed, Otto, his gangly frame slouched in his seat in the row directly behind us. He hadn’t changed a bit -- the dark complexion, the chin beard, and -- something I didn’t remember -- dirty fingernails.
The train had arrived.
I approached him in the foyer during intermission. Was he Otto Riem (now that I knew his last name)? Yes. Had he lived in Aix in 1965-66? Yes. Did he remember me? No. I was glad of that. A small bar had been set up in the lobby and I invited him to join us for a drink.
Sitting at the bar, I continued my questions. Did he remember Hélène? Yes. Had he been here the whole time, after he left Aix? Yes, he said, except for four years studying music in Vienna. At that point I switched to German since my French was rusty anyway, but I then realized that he was not German but Austrian, and his Viennese was even harder for me to follow. I had also run out of questions, and he was as taciturn and monosyllabic as I remembered him from that night in Aix, so I was afraid an embarrassing silence would ensue.
Vee jumped in to save me again, just like that first day when I was stumped by the question about American imperialism. She had less trouble with Otto’s Viennese accent than I did, of course, and with her long legs fetchingly entwined around the barstool, he perked up visibly. They had a nice little chit-chat until the intermission ended.
After the performance I caught sight of him again in the lobby as we were leaving and I called out, "It was nice seeing you, Otto. Maybe we'll run into each other again sometime."
"Yes,” he responded, now showing a spark of enthusiasm., “Maybe in another twenty years!” Maybe he did remember me.
On the way back to the hotel I told Vee about my previous encounter with Otto, years earlier in Aix, and about the strong premonitory feeling I had had ever since our arrival in the town,
"It seems so weird, having this strong sense that something is going to happen, and then it happens. Statistically, I know it can be explained as a coincidence. But that doesn't explain the feeling that I had. It just kept getting stronger until it finally happened. I keep thinking it must mean something. But I have no idea what. Especially since I found out that I had nothing to say to the man. I'm glad you were there. Otherwise we would have just sat there. I buy the guy a drink and then we just sit there in complete silence. That would have been awkward, to say the least!"
"I can see why you said he was a womanizer,” Vee said.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s just something about him. A certain look.”
“What look?” I expected her to say something about how men look who think they can have any woman they want.
“Like a little boy lost," she said.
cela va sans dire.
pas trop mal