–
by Patrick Carrico
–
German children played in the nude, which I found threatening and detestable. It was a warm day between the concrete apartment blocks. The rusty slide and jungle gym were forsaken for a small plastic pool. I watched the neighborhood kids while they were collected around it nude and playing ‘Frog Prince.’ The neighbor’s mother slept in a chair, a book on her knee. I tried to play along yet in order to assume my correct gender role in this scenario, I had to be in the pool. But my clothes weren’t coming off, and no one was going to let me kiss the boys.
“How can you turn him into a prince?” I said, gesturing to a naked boy in the pool. Heide stood nude with her arms crossed and twirling a stick as her wand.
“I am a fairy Godmother,” she said.
“Like God’s mother?” I asked.
“Fairies aren’t God’s mother.” She shook her head and considered the stupidity of the question for a moment. “Don’t you go to church?”
“Of course,” I said, immediately picturing the laundromat on the base and Mrs. Kim who was in charge there. As we did this washing ritual every Sunday, I assumed the laundromat was church. “Everyone goes to church.”
“What church to do you go to?” she asked, skeptically.
Realizing there were more than one church and never having seen Heide at the laundromat, I balked. “I…”
“Do you even go to church?” She accused, pointing her wand. I looked around. The nude boy in the pool was staring at me too. Naturally, I cried and ran away.
My brother was perched in front of the TV. There was a communist propaganda show about competitive recycling we sometimes watched together. Even though we were on the West side of the Berlin Wall, we received both Soviet and American TV. My father commandeered the TV for any and all documentaries on WWII and commented on the action like he was watching a football game. It made our fleeting access to the TV quite precious and my brother was making use of the time.
“What church do we go to?” I asked him.
He slowly turned and considered me in disgust and made a dismissive noise and turned back to the TV. He had no idea.
I approached the kitchen. My father was seated, my mother was standing. Both were shrouded in smoke. They were seldom apart, and seldom not smoking. They maintained a fierce pace of smoking and drinking to make up for the eight hours a day they were expected to be sober at their jobs as schoolteachers at the Kennedy international school in Berlin.
“What church do we go to?” I asked. I worried this question might be used against me in my long struggle to not tie my shoes. The silence that followed was long and ponderous. My parents looked at each other for a while. Then my dad turned to me and made unflinching eye contact.
He said simply, “We are Jewish.” My mother cackled at a dark inside joke I could not yet fathom.
Armed with knowledge and spiritual righteousness, I nonchalantly returned to the nude bathers and their pool game. My teary exit was forgotten by now and I took Hiede, her mother, and their friend by surprise when I suddenly declared, “I…am Jewish.” I basked in the silence that followed and took leave to play alone in the grass growing over some mass grave… as was my Jewish privilege. I knew about mass graves from the documentaries my father watched.
***
Questions seem to mean different things in different languages. On the rusty play equipment behind the JFK Schule in Berlin, Heide asked ‘Woher kommst du aus?’ This question meant something very different from, ‘Where-ya from.” I could answer the English version; ‘I’m from A Merry Kah,’ or ‘Ory-gun.’ The German question wasn’t so simple. Other kids answered with words like ‘Frankreich,’ or ‘Hamburg.’ So when Heide asked me, ‘Woher kommst du aus,’ after months of friendship, I knew it merited further investigation.
Thoughtfully sucking on the iron pipe holding the swing set up, I shrugged my shoulders. Heide kicked higher and higher in the air and the vibrations on my teeth and in my nose were becoming almost unbearable. My eyes fell on the men in full hazmat suits as they wandered the playground. I noticed the American flag patches on their shoulders. I guessed they were looking for pieces of Chernobyl, which the news had told us had recently exploded. I decided to repeat the question to one of them.
Tugging on one of the men’s thick suits, he turned, startled, and surveyed the playground. For some reason he was quite on edge. Presently he realized I was down at his knee-level. He breathed forcefully through a respirator on his mask and peered down at me.
“It’s okay children, keep playing,” he said distantly through his facial apparatus.
“Woher Komst du aus?” I asked.
“It’s okay children, keep playing,” he repeated. Then, in his heavy hazmat suit, he flapped his arms, resembling the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, shouting, “Lustig!” which meant ‘fun,’ or ‘go have fun’ or ‘I don’t speak much German and I have an important job to do.’ He then turned and continued to operate the clicking device in his hands. I scampered off, taking wide strides to not trip over my untied laces.
Hiede tied my laces for me as we lined up to go inside, right before I was to take my shoes off again and put on my sandals. “Lustig,’ I said.
***
On the bus that afternoon my brother stared stoically forward. I stared at him. Occasionally he gnawed at his fingernails. Finally I got up the courage to ask.
“Woher kommst du aus?” I asked him.
He looked incredulously at me.
“Portland,” he said. “I come from Portland.”
This seemed wrong somehow. I stewed on his answer for a while, squirming in my seat, wiping snot on my sleeves. The bus ride today was extra long. A large tank followed us home. The barrel of its gun dramatically danced when the tank went over any bump. I had overheard something about a disco getting blown up the night before. If it had anything to do with the men in suits on the playground, I had no idea. There were many mysteries in the air that day. I turned back to my brother.
“Ich komme aus Portland,” I said.
“Du kommst aus Turkei,” he said.
I liked this answer. The question had been incomplete because the answer had been in English. “Ich komme aus Turkei,” I repeated, not knowing my brother was using a common German playground racist insult.
I truly believed I was learning a lot about myself that spring. Not only was I a Turkish Jew in post-genocide Berlin, I was learning it was okay not being able to tie one’s shoes since so many other people had that skill already. These truths were the foundation of a healthy childhood and would serve as launchpad into a sane, healthy adulthood (so I thought).
The bus let us off and creeped away. We waved at the bored soldiers on top of the tank as they passed. That night as we leaned out the window of the Eagles Nest, my father’s name for the apartment, a gigantic Soviet helicopter hovered over the playground with searchlights panning to and fro. It was huge and the wind it kicked up knocked the spring flowers off the trees. To a child, a helicopter that size was a real treat, not an intrusion from a hostile country. I realize now, between Chernobyl, terrorist bombings, and Soviet reconnaissance, Berlin was too ‘Lustig’ for my dad. He wanted to go home.
I didn’t learn I wasn’t Turkish or Jewish until my late teens. A woman I was dating had to explain to me, oh so diplomatically, that it just wasn’t very probable. My subsequent personality crisis fit right into a family tradition of alienation, dark humor, and a reluctance to let one’s guard down. I suppose my father felt as foreign in Berlin as I did trying to play with the naked kids my age. And those cigarettes and bottles of wine were the clothing he could not take off.
–
–
–
Patrick Carrico is an author and shelter worker, born in Portland Oregon. Unlike the clinical treatments of the homeless populations in Portland that distill experiences down to numbers, Carrico’s writing gives readers the voices, names, and histories of persons who are never asked and frequently ignored on the streets of Portland.
–
–
–
–
—