25. Berlin
BERLIN
As usual, it had rained all day. Jack held his sisters’ hands as they walked down wet sidewalks past a playground in the direction of the train tracks that crossed the south side of Savignyplatz.
Zoe tugged on his hand. “Can we stop?”
“Not right now,” Jack said. “I don’t want to be late.”
“Who are we meeting?” Alice said.
“Her name’s Monika.”
“Is she your girlfriend?” Zoe said.
“No,” Jack said, “and don’t say anything dumb like that in front of her.”
“Does she speak English?” Alice said.
“I assume so,” said Jack. “Pretty much everyone speaks English here. Sometimes they speak English better than we do.”
Zoe squeezed his hand. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “Our education system is flawed.”
“Is that why my grades are so bad?” said Zoe.
“ Yo hablo espanol ,” said Alice.
“I don’t,” said Zoe.
“Listen,” Jack said, stopping in his tracks, “just promise me, you’ll just be nice, and you’ll let me talk to this girl, and you won’t say anything to embarrass me.”
“Like what?” said Zoe.
“Like… anything. We want to make a good impression on her because she’s friends with Emmi, and Emmi’s parents are taking care of our pets. So we want Monika to tell her we’re normal people.”
“We’re not normal people?” said Alice.
“We are,” he said, and started walking again. “And we want Monika to see that.” Jack was feeling very anxious, aware as always of the knot in his stomach.
He’d tried reading Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety but found it impenetrable.
He was bad at many things, but studying—reading and understanding—was not usually one of them, so when his attempts to make sense of Kierkegaard’s philosophical writings failed, Jack was all the more intrigued.
He’d had almost no practice in reading philosophy, and deciphering this shit turned out to be really hard.
He’d googled the Kierkegaard Research Centre and clicked on the “Staff” page to find Bj?rn.
There was a picture of him at the top of the page; they looked eerily alike.
He tried to read some of Bj?rn’s writing on Kierkegaard, stuff about “existence spheres” and how Kierkegaard said these spheres—aesthetic, ethical, and religious—gave life value and lead one to “becoming a self.” Jack reread the pages multiple times, feeling like his head would explode.
A biosphere, he thought, was a lot easier to understand than an existence sphere. But he hoped Bj?rn would answer his letter. He was really looking forward to meeting the guy.
Jack and his sisters turned the corner onto Knesebeckstra?e and crossed the street.
Sitting outside the café was the coolest-looking girl Jack had ever seen.
She was wearing a long white skirt with clunky biker boots and a tank top with a skull and crossbones.
Her hair was long and untamed and had a streak of blue on one side.
“Hey,” he said, still gripping the girls’ hands. “Monika?”
She pulled off her sunglasses and looked up from her phone. “Jack?”
“Yeah, hi. Thanks for meeting me.”
She looked at the girls in surprise. “And who are you?”
“I’m Alice,” his sister said, kicking the sidewalk with her sandal.
“Nice to meet you, Alice,” Monika said. “And?” she said, turning to Zoe.
“Zoe,” Zoe said.
“Are you Zwilling ? Twins?”
They nodded at her with eyes wide, clearly awed by her and feeling shy. He felt exactly the same way.
“I hope it’s okay they came along,” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “No problem.” She spoke English with a heavy accent and a lot of confidence.
Jack took a chair across from her. On the table was a half-finished fruit and cheese plate, a slice of cake with one bite taken out of it, and an empty plate that had the remnants of a salad. There was also an empty champagne glass and a cappuccino that appeared to have just been served.
“Am I… late?” he said. It looked like she had ordered almost everything on the menu and had been there for quite some time.
“No,” she said, sitting back in her chair.
Zoe leaned on him shyly, and Alice sat carefully in the chair beside him.
Monika tapped her fingers on the table, not impatiently, more like she was assessing him and finding him lacking. Her nails were painted black. She took a sip of her cappuccino and dabbed her upper lip with a napkin.
“What do you think of Berlin?” she said.
“It’s great,” he said. “It’s good to be away from Dallas.”
“Why is that?” she said, cocking her head and watching him closely.
He wished he hadn’t said that. “The weather?” he said. “Dallas is very hot in the summer.”
“So what are you doing while you’re here?” she asked. “Do you have a job?”
Jack pointed to the girls. “They’re it. I’m babysitting in the evenings while my mom works.” He both hoped and feared Monika was about to invite him to something. “I’m free on weekends.”
“So all day you do… what?” Monika said. “Are you studying?”
“I was,” Jack said. It was starting to feel like an interview, which was super confusing. “I’m between high school and college, so I’m on a break. But I guess you—”
“You must be bored,” she said. “I have to stay busy all the time. Otherwise, I go… verrückt ? Umm, out of my mind.” She spun her finger in circles by her ear.
Jack felt he was failing a test. “Same,” he said. “I wish I had more to do this summer. Too much free time is never a good idea.”
“Are you looking for something?” she said, her face brightening.
“Yeah,” he said, “I guess.”
“Because an idea is just coming into my mind,” Monika said, tapping her temple. “Do you want to do something good? Volunteer maybe?”
“Sure,” he said. And he did.
“Can we order food?” said Alice impatiently.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “We’ll get menus as soon as someone comes.”
“I have a friend at an organization called Alle Tage,” Monika said. “They do very important work. Do you speak any German?”
“I don’t.” He found himself focusing on the small, silver stud in her left nostril.
“ Aber ich spreche schon ein bisschen ,” said Zoe.
Jack looked at her in surprise. “Excuse me?”
Zoe shrugged, like she hadn’t just done something completely mind-blowing. “The kids at the pool won’t talk to us in English,” she said.
Alice turned to Monika. “ Warum hast du blaue Haare? ”
Jack was stunned. All he’d learned so far was a handful of words, bitte and danke, ja and nein, rechts and links . He would have to up his game to keep up with his sisters.
Monika smiled and touched a hand to the blue streak. “Because I like it. And it’s my body, my hair, my life, so I get to do whatever I want.”
“Did you have to ask your mom?” Alice said.
“No,” said Monika, “and when you’re my age, you’ll also get to do whatever you want without asking permission.”
Jack tried to picture his sisters as teenagers, blue streaks in their hair; it was impossible to imagine, and he kind of hated the idea.
Monika’s phone rang with a jangly tune. Jack glanced at it just long enough to see a girl’s picture on the screen and the name “Emmi.”
She silenced the call.
“ Ich muss auf die Toilette ,” Zoe said.
Even Jack could understand that. “Okay,” he said, “but go together.” Alice got up reluctantly and the two went inside the café.
Monika’s phone rang again, and again it was Emmi. This time she not only silenced it but turned it over.
“Can you start tomorrow?” she said.
“Sure,” Jack said, thinking it would be fun to spend a few hours with her, serving meals at a shelter or whatever they were going to do. He hoped it wasn’t out of his skill set.
“You’ll need to learn a few German words, although some are basically the same in English. Brauchen means need. So when you go to a location, you ask, Brauchen Sie Binden? Go on.”
“Brau-ken Sie… Binden?” Jack said.
“ Genau ,” said Monika. “The ch is soft. Brauchen .”
Jack repeated after her, feeling silly; he didn’t even know what he was saying.
“ Sehr gut ,” she said. She was smiling.
He nodded, feeling like he’d finally passed a test. “Where do I meet you?”
“I won’t be there,” she said.
“Oh,” said Jack, trying to mask his disappointment. “So… who am I meeting then?”
Before she could answer, a guy came up from behind her and put his hands over Monika’s eyes.
She pulled them away, laughing. He leaned over, and Jack could swear he was about to kiss her when she said something quickly to him.
Jack tried to parse a phrase or even a word, but Duolingo had not prepared him for this fast exchange, most of which was spoken with Monika’s face turned away.
The guy looked at Jack then but did not say hello and did not offer his hand.
“Sorry, we have to run,” Monika said, getting her keys and phone off the table. “We’re leaving town tomorrow.”
“Ah,” said Jack, disappointed their meeting was ending so soon and so abruptly. It felt good to talk to someone his age.
While Monika got her jacket from the back of her chair, the guy stood there, feet apart and arms crossed, like a stocky bodyguard. Or a bulldog.
“Are you going on vacation?” Jack said.
“Work,” said Monika. “We got jobs in Heiligenhafen.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s this town on the Baltic Sea. Very pretty.”
“Sounds cool,” said Jack.
Zoe and Alice came back to the table, eyeing the newcomer.
“I’ll put you in touch with my friend Nathalie who organizes the volunteers,” Monika said, “and she’ll tell you what you need to know.” She stood up next to the guy who was shorter than she was by a few inches. She turned to the girls.
“ Tschüss ,” she said. “ Viel Spa? in Berlin .”
“ Tschüss ,” the girls said.
“And good luck,” she said to Jack, smiling at him for the first time. “I really think this is the right thing for a guy like you.”
They walked away and once they got halfway down the block, the guy stepped closer to her and Monika slipped a hand into his back pocket, turned her head, and kissed him.
“A guy like me?” he said. He turned to Alice and Zoe. “What does that mean?”
The waitress came out then, for the first time since they’d arrived, and handed Jack a bill for ???€47.50.