Achtung Baby Read online

  I couldn’t see how we were going to make it work in another country though. We discussed the move at length in conversations that went something like this:

  “This is our last chance to go somewhere before we finally settle down and become boring,” Zac said.

  “Who’s boring? I’m not bored,” I said.

  “You’re too busy to be bored.”

  “I’m too tired to be bored,” I said. “But I don’t want to live in Germany for such a long time.”

  “It’s a three-year contract,” Zac said.

  “Three years is a long time,” I said. “I’ll be old when we get back. Germany will steal the last of my youth.”

  “New experiences will keep us young,” he said. “We’ll be learning a new culture, a new language!”

  “Gesundheit,” I said. Zac looked at me oddly. “That’s all I know how to say in German.”

  “How about Sprechen Sie Englisch?” Zac said.

  “I think I’ll be saying that a lot.”

  “But think of Sophia. She’ll be bilingual!” Zac said.

  “Don’t tell that to my mom,” I said. My mother was a retired French teacher, who had her grandchildren all call her Grandmère. She would be firmly against Sophia learning German instead of French—and, most of all, against us taking her granddaughter so far away.

  “How about the city? Is it nice?” I asked Zac.

  “Well, the institute is in a small town.”

  “How small?”

  “Six thousand people, but I could commute. We could live in Berlin,” he said.

  “Berlin?” I didn’t know much about the capital of Germany other than a smattering of information from my high school history classes. I knew it was where JFK had declared himself a Berliner, and that the Wall had existed there and had been torn down. I was somewhat intrigued.

  “You’ll be able to take some time off,” Zac said. “We could have another baby. You could stay home, have time to write like you always wanted.”

  He had my attention now. “Could we afford that?”

  “More than if I took a postdoc in the United States,” he said. “Berlin is an exciting place. It will be an adventure. Really, when are we going to have another opportunity like this?”

  I had to admit he had a point. I could see that Germany offered some real opportunities for our family and our careers, and wasn’t it me who had told Zac all those many years ago to chase his dreams? If we stayed, I knew we’d both be settling, not even giving our dreams a chance. So this time I listened to Zac. We were moving to Germany.

  A Cold Arrival

  We landed in Berlin in January, not exactly the best month of the year to be in northern Germany. The holidays were just past, and because of the high latitude, the sun only appeared for six or seven hours each day. Still it had snowed and everything, including the tall city buildings, looked enchanted, coated in glistening white. We stayed in a hotel near Mitte—the center of Berlin—that bordered a huge park. The first chance we got, we bundled Sophia up and took our two-year-old for a fun walk through the snowy woods. It felt almost like a fairy tale. Here we were in this huge metropolis, and yet somehow we found ourselves in a forested winter wonderland.

  The next day, we left to stay in a guesthouse near Zac’s work, in a small town about forty-five minutes east of Berlin. Here, it was a snowy wonderland too but minus the city buildings. A few days later, Zac started work, and I was a stay-at-home mom for the first time in my life. Outside of those first three months of maternity leave, I’d never had so much time with my young daughter all by myself. Sophia and I had a whole stretch of eight hours together every day—in a foreign country, in a small town with no car, and a bus that ran only once an hour. While the snow fell, it was easy. We built snowmen and forts. We had snowball fights and took sled rides (me pulling while she sat, sang songs, and ate snow). I made her hot cocoa and elaborate lunches.

  When the snow melted, so did the fairy tale. Everything turned muddy, and entertaining a two-year-old mostly inside for long stretches of the day was a challenge. It started to feel less and less like we were playing together, and more like work—often boring work. We were also isolated. I had no friends to call on or mom groups to join. Most of the other people in the guesthouse were single without children and away at work during the day. As much as I loved my little daughter, she literally had the conversational skills of a toddler. I began to look forward to the time Zac came home, so I could finally have another adult to talk to.

  Nadine, the woman who ran the guesthouse, must have noticed my daily struggles with my daughter. After we had been there about a month, she suggested we try to see if we could find a spot for Sophia at the local child-care center.

  “But I’m not working,” I said, confused.

  “She will have other children to play with! And they have a playground and more toys,” she said. “I think it will be more fun for her, no?”

  This was the first time I encountered the positive attitude many Germans in the East have toward child care, and she made some good points on how it might be better for both me and Sophia. Still, I waved the suggestion off. Child care, in my American mind, was to benefit working parents, not the children themselves. Besides, this situation was temporary, I told myself. We’d soon be moving to Berlin, where there would be more things for Sophia to do.

  We started taking trips to the capital city every weekend to search for an apartment. We finally settled on Friedrichshain (pronounced “freed-ricks-hine”), a relatively affordable, formerly working-class neighborhood with pockets of trendy stores, clubs, and restaurants. The only trouble: we couldn’t find a landlord to rent to us. We would show up to apartment viewings and run into a dozen other applicants who had filled out their applications beforehand and spoke fluent German. The landlords appeared friendly to us, and some didn’t even mind speaking English.

  Still, we were never the first choice as renters, not necessarily because we were American, but because they didn’t think we would stay. It was the opposite of what we had experienced in California, where landlords seemed to prefer tenants who would leave after a year, so they could hike up the rent with the next lease. German landlords, on the other hand, valued the security of steady renters, and many Berliners looked at apartments not as short-term residences, but as homes where they would live for ten, even twenty years.

  Then we found our dream apartment. It was in an old historic building from around 1910, a rare survivor of the bombs from two world wars. It had high ceilings, wide windows, and wood floors that stretched through spacious rooms. The whole building had been renovated and included an elevator, also a rare find in Berlin.

  We wanted this place, badly, so we asked Nadine for help. She agreed to go with us to meet the landlord. She not only made communications easier but also knew how to clinch the deal. She pulled out Zac’s work contract, which said, among other things, that he was guaranteed a salary for three years. At the time, most of the Western world was in a recession, and unemployment in Berlin was particularly high. “Look, he’s got a good job,” Nadine told the landlord, slapping the paper down in front of him. We got the apartment.

  Everything in Order

  Getting our apartment was one of the first lessons I learned about how things were done in Germany. It was important to have the right piece of paper. Our adventure was going to require a lot of paperwork.

  Another key document was the permission for me to work in Germany. I always knew I wasn’t cut out to be a stay-at-home mom, and the months in the country had confirmed that. Plus, any extra income I brought in definitely wouldn’t hurt. So, early one morning, Sophia and I bravely set off for the ausländerbehörde, the immigration office located on the opposite side of Berlin.

  Even from the outside, the ausländerbehörde seemed to confirm the negative stereotype of Germany’s socialist bureaucracy. The building itself was a massive, intimidating block of gray stone with long lines of people waiting in front of it.
r />   When I finally made it to the front of the line and handed over my documents, I quickly realized I had another big hurdle to face.

  “Frau Tsah-skuh?”

  It took me a moment to realize the woman behind the desk was speaking to me. Her eyes were still on the papers I had handed her. Our family always said our name as “Zask-ee” with a buzzing z, a flat a, and a Polish-sounding “ski” at the end. I hadn’t heard it pronounced correctly in German before.

  “Ja?” I said, smiling. She didn’t smile back. She launched into a rapid string of German.

  “Um … Sprechen Sie Englisch?” I asked.

  She looked at me over her glasses. “Nein.” Then, slowly: “Sie sind in Deutschland. Wir sprechen Deutsch hier.”

  I knew enough to understand that I was in trouble. My toddler daughter yanked at my hand impatiently. A long line of people stood behind us. I could feel the weight of their eyes. Like me, they were foreigners from all over the world. Surely, these bureaucrats didn’t expect all of them to speak German? But, yes, they did. Even though most Germans know some English, I would soon learn that official business is always conducted auf Deutsch at all government offices, even at the agency in charge of immigrants.

  I had traveled about an hour by train and foot across Berlin with my two-and-a-half-year-old in tow and waited another half hour in line before I had made it to this point. I didn’t know much German yet, but I had to try.

  “Wiederholen Sie bitte?” I asked, using a phrase I’d learned from a language CD that was supposed to mean “Please say that again?” (I would later learn that Berliners usually say Wie bitte? or “How’s that please?”)

  The woman sighed. She repeated what she’d said slowly and loudly. I caught the word for number and room. She gestured behind her and handed my papers back to me. “Danke,” I said and backed away from the counter. I wandered down the hall and found a pair of waiting rooms. In each room, people were seated on plastic chairs, staring at a screen displaying different numbers. This was the DMV, I thought, on steroids. Underneath the screen, I saw a red plastic snail number dispenser like the kind you find at a butcher’s counter. I went up to it to take a number only to find there were none left. I checked the next room, same story. I tried asking the guard, who threw up his hands at my accented German. I gave up and went home defeated, but only temporarily.

  This was just one of many experiences I had visiting government agencies, or ämter. At another office, I sat outside a door for forty-five minutes to get a kita-gutschein, a magical document that would allow me to enroll my daughter in child care for a fraction of what I had paid in Oregon. I waited for a long time as other parents went in and out, only to learn upon my turn that I had been waiting outside the door for the wrong part of the alphabet. When I found the right door and handed over my application, the official asked for another document that I did not have with me.

  “Next time bring a whole binder,” a German friend told me later. “That way they can’t come up with something that you don’t have ready to hand to them. Plus, you look prepared.”

  Seeking more help, I joined a mom’s expat group, and soon found a new German-speaking friend who was willing to help me at the ausländerbehörde: Taska, an American raised by a German mother, who’d lived in Germany for seven years. She was also eight months pregnant. I didn’t bring Sophia that time, but the size of Taska’s belly moved us up in line. Still, we didn’t get any farther than the waiting room, but I left feeling hopeful because after some negotiations with the woman behind the desk, Taska found a way for me to make an appointment.

  In the meantime, I tried to master the task of grocery shopping. Our new apartment, which may have been a classic from 1910, was across the street from a shopping mall that was more of a classic from 1990. In the basement of the mall was a grocery store, which looked pretty much like any grocery store you’d find in the United States, only smaller. It had shopping carts, aisles, and even old American pop music playing over the intercom. No problem, I thought. I know this kind of place. I plopped Sophia into the cart seat and started down the aisles, singing along to “Maneater” by Hall and Oates. Sophia laughed and helped me pick out fruit and yogurt. Everything was going well until I reached the checkout line.

  I stood at the counter as the checkout clerk rang up my purchases. She said something to me. I smiled. She said it again and jabbed her chin in the direction of the piling-up groceries. I noticed there was no packer, so I started to fill my own bags. The clerk looked at me like I’d lost my mind. She said something that sounded angry and made a sweeping gesture with her arm. I turned and saw how the other customers were quickly refilling their carts with unpacked groceries then pushing them over to the side where they packed their bags out of the way. Rushed and embarrassed, I threw my groceries back into the cart, while my daughter did her best to “help” by picking up items off the counter and randomly dropping them again.

  I paid and pushed my cart off to the side to pack my bags. It felt crazy, but after several trips to stores, I realized that I never waited more than a few minutes in line because everyone moved out of the way and packed their bags themselves.

  When my appointment came again for the ausländerbehörde, Zac went with me. We left early, but we had a difficult trip. It was snowing, and the trains were delayed. The sidewalks were icy, making it hard to rush without slipping. By the time we got to the office, our assigned bureaucrat was already meeting with someone else.

  “Es ist vorbei,” he said, waving us away. The appointment has passed!

  Zac looked at his phone. “It’s only fifteen minutes after.”

  The official repeated that the appointment had passed, more loudly.

  “We can wait,” Zac said.

  “Nein.”

  “But the snow—” I stammered. “The trains—” It was no use. He sent us home. Late was late, which apparently was unforgivable in Germany. I soon learned this was true for almost any appointment, even social ones. Germans show up at the time a party starts, not ten minutes late as most Americans tend to do.

  I was starting to get the message about how things were done in Germany: Show up on time. Pack your own bags. Get your paperwork in order. Be prepared. In short, be responsible.

  Life in Germany was not a never-ending bureaucratic nightmare, even though when we were slogging back home through the snow from that trip to the ausländerbehörde, it felt that way. The German system will reward those who are organized—and persistent.

  For instance, I followed my friend’s advice and went back to the kitagutschein office with a binder. A few weeks later, I received the gutschein for Sophia in the mail. I wrote several letters with copies of documents and soon we were also receiving kindergeld as well, a monthly benefit the German government pays to families with children, and I made another appointment at the ausländerbehörde. I showed up on time with a binder full of documents and left victorious with a new page in my passport, permitting me to work in Germany.

  It wasn’t my victory alone. I had help. Another thing I learned from these experiences was that despite first impressions, many Germans are friendly in a meaningful way. They may not smile and chat with strangers as Americans do, but once you get to know a German, they will often do whatever they can to help you. Throughout our early days in Berlin, we were never short of German friends and colleagues who volunteered to help us get settled in their country, navigate their formidable bureaucracy, and even move furniture that didn’t fit in our small elevator up several flights of stairs—a true test of any friendship.

  We had a lot to move because our beautiful apartment was also completely empty. New tenants in Berlin bring everything with them including the kitchen sink—quite literally. There was no sink in our kitchen—nor was there a stove, a refrigerator, or cupboards. The ceilings had no lights, only holes with wires hanging down. We started acquiring all these necessary things slowly, one at a time, and our apartment started to look like a real home.

  When
a German wants to know if everything is all right with you, they say, “Alles in Ordnung?” meaning literally “Everything in order?” After a few months in Germany, I could say our life was finally getting in order. Our apartment was close to a train station, and Zac arranged to get a monthly card so he could commute to work—and take us all around the city for free on weekends. With the gutschein, I would soon be able to enroll Sophia in child care and have a few uninterrupted hours to work every day. A new bakery opened downstairs in our building, sending up warm smells of bread and pastries. Every morning, I’d go downstairs to buy fresh rolls. We started exploring Berlin, which in the spring was transforming from a cold, dark place into a green city full of open-air cafés and tree-filled parks.

  Just as I’d hoped, there was a lot more for Sophia to do in Berlin. We were delighted to discover that our own kiez (“neighborhood”) had several excellent playgrounds within walking distance of our apartment. We gave them names according to their inventive play structures: “spider park,” which had a circular web-like swing made of rope for groups of kids to swing in; “shady park,” which had nothing but trees, some wooden huts, and a sand pit (Zac also called it “boring park,” but Sophia liked it); and “tire park,” which had a large circle of tire swings. Sophia enjoyed all these playgrounds, but they were nothing compared to “Dragon Park.”

  Sandwiched between blocks of apartment houses, Dragon Park featured a huge green wooden dragon about twenty feet high with big teeth and a gullet made of rope mesh that kids could sit in. Two giant slides extended off its side. In front of the dragon, wooden poles were driven into the sand with ropes slung between them about six feet off the ground, which children used to walk precariously between the poles. Some of the other structures were obviously meant for smaller children, like an easy obstacle course that snaked around the dragon’s feet. It ended in a long dark tunnel made of wood, too small for parents to crawl into with their kids.