Greener Days

In Ireland I was a tourist again. There had been a time when I wasn’t. Young and wanting to fuck, I’d swapped my country for the continent and ended up in Heidelberg, a medium-size college town full of U.S. Army bases—the center of that army in Europe. Touristy, too—it retained its old-world beauty because the Allies hadn’t bombed the old town since they planned on living there after they won the war. A river ran through it—on one side, the Altstadt, terminating in the sixteenth century castle, a quarter-ruined by the constant French and German grappling over the sandy loam beneath; on the other, showy views of that piece of history from cosmetic foothills giving way to densely forested slopes of beeches, oaks, and firs. Upon leaving, I’d stay on a farm in the south of France for six months, toiling away, kamikazily in concert with the earth. An opportunity.

Physical labor—after I dropped out of film school, a few years earlier, I’d lived on an organic farm in Northern California. There’s a poetry to the body’s movements in hard work. The muscles cook for solid hours since the mind can’t quite fixate, but instead meanders from dirt pile to dust pile, flower to flower, in strange glades. The effort to become obsessive is too much in light of the arms buckling, shoulders wrenching, and thighs quaking from spearing and heaving out shovelfuls of dirt and pitchforking free knotty, earth-aged weeds. Dust and dirt cake the face, lips, and nostrils, but fresh farm air keeps the breath firm. Someone knew somebody who’d had to drop out in France. I wouldn’t get paid, but farmers didn’t farm for the money. Seasonal worker? I didn’t care about a title, just a new life. I’d needed to erase the failure of so many things, not just the failure to create. I needed to quiet my head. Something screwy had begun going on up there.

I could still be alone for vast tracts of time, playing into my own stupor, as I had in childhood, but being out of the country, away from touch and trying to keep to the proud strictures of the new language, I began to tighten. Riding my rickety old French grandpa bike through the deep green hills at the edge of the Odenwald, an unimpressive mountain range, or walking over the river to the ancient hedges and vineyards on the other side and glowering at the ruined Schloß didn’t steady me anymore.

My European experience in Germany had been a benighted one, but at least I knew you went to Europe to become a writer, not a filmmaker. I wasn’t naive enough to think it could still be Paris in the twenties or Prague in the nineties. Berlin didn’t want me. I did glom on to Hamburg, leasing for a discount, but the friend who was supposed to be in Milan for three months came back very early, heartbroken and nightly whinnying. He wanted me to watch bad movies with him. I had to change my life from watching to making and told him how I needed to get back to copying out pages of Gatsby because I was learning a new trade. He bitched and said hardly anyone would be reading novels in fifteen years and he was right.

I corralled a hovel in a suburban shithole near Heidelberg. My neighbor worked at a computer company, and he set me up proof-reading translations of their manuals. The next week I fell in love with Ruth, pronounced Hrut. Red hair, really vermillion. A graduate student with glasses so close to the color of glass they seemed frameless, two lenses magically suspended. She often wore black to damper her abundance of chest. One of that breed of Germans who patterned their English with a British pronunciation—she adored London and all its paraphernalia, the Tate and its paintings, the truer Soho, fish and chips, faces weighing their envy. She disdained America but liked me—for a time. Three seasons, not consecutive. We broke up in July and came around with December’s holiday chill, following the course of most relationships between people our age. The only reason she let me in the door was my middling talent for writing and “Your pelt,” she said, while petting my massed chest hair as we read verse naked. “And your resemblance to Ted Hughes,” she added tartly. She moused around with a sort of official yet unofficial writing group to which friends of the enrolled showed up sporadically and gave critiques, while violently defending DeLillo from disrespect, then disappeared, though those who attended the university did earn credit. The instructor, if he could be called that, was a Londoner—a great anamorphic schnoz, his dominant feature. Sometimes he had students to his office and gave them middle-shelf sherry. I knew of no improprieties. Several classes were held in beer halls or gardens, the bar food dripping German grease. Everyone seemed so happy the few times I went along. I was treated with the utmost kindness, an effervescence rivaling what my closest stateside friends held in their arsenal. There was none of the horseshit of men showing off to cajole women into sleeping with them. Yes, a host of ribbing, foisted through English-style snark—given the leader—with people preying on another’s tics, weaknesses, and phobias. A similar show in any writing class, but the undercurrent was warm enough—the core clan of seventeen or eighteen felt comfortable and spit in the face of competition, with no vandalizing intentions, though surely this was easy to do when enjoying liquor or beer during class time.

Ruth knew another woman there: Sonja, a temperamental blonde with a holy subduing voice husking, in short time, only after me. Ruth said nothing about her—they were different women. Sonja resembled one of those hydrocephalic figures in Cranach the Elder. From her eyebrows down (dainty nose, slit of a mouth) her face appeared scrunched, but that high, intimidating forehead went on and on, the heavy cranium behind a bowling ball, ready to dissemble for my inches. A psychologist, she breathed high art and enunciated both of her fluent languages deftly, her nickered consonants continually cracking the air. Her last boyfriend, who’d turned dopey, had just been dropped and, threatening suicide, got himself admitted to the hospital she worked at. When able to roam, he knew which angle of his unit’s glassy see-through stairwell to stand at to see her go to or from her office, three floors below.

Her pursuit of me was all too obvious. Ruth didn’t want me to come to the class anymore. There were only two more to go. She said she wouldn’t want me to hear and silently judge her latest story about a dying grandmother. Then only one session remained, to be held at an exquisite old university-owned house just off the Neckar River, near the old town, by the Schloß. A celebratory evening. Many insisted I come and read something. Even a poem. And I did have a poem. Something unfailingly naïve and chichi, with one good metaphor in its seventy lines. After fifty people stormed through a crate of wine, we relaxed in the large second-floor drawing room, where priceless lamps hummed their jaundiced light, color-coordinating with the June sky’s pink hues. Most inappropriately, I read something about driving in Montana, a poem overloaded with ennui. Silence reigned when I finished, and before anyone could say anything, Sonja issued a fart loud and large enough to shake the creaky wooden floor. I couldn’t believe it. I also tried to believe that no-one but me noticed—a fantasy despoiled by dozens of people holding their faces in their hands. The teacher delivered his edict: Epic, lad, epic. People exploded, and all the swirling faux melancholia of the poem evaporated. I had to hand it to Sonja and even said so later, opening myself to be swatted down again with some sassy suggestive remark. But no—she was too soused, too sad, and in the gloaming of turning twenty-eight while emotionally albatrossed to a douchebag who wouldn’t let go of her. Instead, the retort came later that night in bed, from Ruth. I dinked about statically and spooned her after we finished. She remained still. Then: Unhand me, sir. Words said seriously enough for a child to translate them as “fuck off.” Maybe just a drink-infused, late-night irruption? I slept peacefulish. But it was the warning shot, followed by a “Let’s take some time off” the next morning.

The summer passed. I began to hate computers and not just their manuals. In October, Ruth turned friendly. We read Mrs Dalloway together. Then the holidays were bitter. January: more suffocating. You know yourself, she said, I detest Americans.

I thought “disdain.”

Now you’ll have something to write about. Oh, do you need Sonja’s number?

For the next six weeks, I couldn’t write a sentence. I took to the hills across the Neckar and the famous Philosophenweg, where august luminaries from the oldest university in Germany were said to walk among the trees and find their deep thoughts. The paths had since become a requirement for tourist groups. Long weeks of mindless trudging in the jewel of the Rhine Rift Valley, its earth filled with sea-sediment and under loads of leaves that never seemed to disappear, even in summer. Damp days, each one gray and severe. Unending chills. The coldest winter, in one of the warmer parts of Germany, for thirty years. I had a sweater and two jackets and was still cold. Magnesium, my mother would have warned. Eat some fucking beef, a crass California friend would have shouted. Eating wasn’t a favored activity, but neither was starving. Something had broken, though I didn’t know it. When you’re not yet thirty you don’t tend to feel too keenly, that’s why most of our derring-do occurs before then. What was I doing in Europe? Pretending? Possibly. I’d stopped all contact with everyone there and back home. I stopped reading. I developed many infections.

Each day, just after seven in the morning, I would cross the river from the old town and again zig and zag though the network of winding paths, coursing over the Schlangenweg and up through terraced vineyards to wander on a concentration of well-maintained trails. I circled and reconnoitered before rising to and eventually locating the lookout towers, the Celtic remains, the Thingstätte—an amphitheater built by the Nazis—climbing and gazing, waiting for breath to escape my nostrils and mouth and let me know I was alive. I used what extra money I had to buy new boots and by day ten they stank, years aged. I carried a thermos of hot water and a bag of carrots to get me through to lunch, often tea and a day-old dessert.

Glacial-blooded after four hours of breathing dampness, I would sit in one of two cafés for that bittersweet break. More often, I returned to one in the old town, by the Church of the Holy Spirit, where I’d taken Ruth to see the Bach Cello Suites performed and fell asleep midway through number two’s allemande. I stationed myself by the steamed-up windows, cradling a pot of peppermint. They had the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the International Herald Tribune; I stuck with the Zeitung, reading only enough to get an idea of the darting language with the verbs caboosing the sentence. Then I’d pore over the numbers on the financial page, primarily the DAX. I noted that the stock of the computer company I’d worked for had risen considerably after my departure. I’d quit my job the day of the breakup; I left because I thought I should go back to school, even in Germany, to better myself. What if one day I was to be married, even in a kind of gauche way, clipped onto Ruth like a pendant, because I fully believed we’d get back together like all lust-drenched cou¬ples eventually accomplish? Thoughts like this crossed my mind, and I would hold on to them for unaccountable minutes until I realized I had left my body during the questioning and any more queries I had didn’t matter until the tracing-paper of my consciousness fit over my body again, and the soul came to life.

I usually sat in the café for two hours, perked as the beans, watching the passersby on the brick street in Altstadt, which did not allow cars or even trams. I followed people, urbanites, whom I was shocked to see messing with their phones. A texting craze had taken over Europe because the telecom companies charged so much, even for local calls: so texting began as a cost-effective measure and not because people didn’t want to talk. I peered down the street, my eyes made sick again by storefronts for designer shoes, clothes, handbags—there a bar, there a Turkish restaurant. Behind these was the red-brown brick of taller university buildings and, half a click south, where I could see, the psychiatric hospital, where Sonja’s ex had once pitted himself against her. She had called me after Ruth’s departure. We flung about for some weeks. While I was dressed in puce lingerie (hers) she had me read her Sir Alfred Noyes’ ‘The Highwayman,’ lingam unrestricted. She taught me about wine, we argued about Rilke. Rumor went she’d returned to the douchebag.

One late night, I ended up in an old university building at three in the morning with two strangers I’d drunk and danced with. The man was a member of the fraternity house there, a truly exclusive society stretching back to Napoleonic times; the woman, an American, traipsed along, delighted she could smoke in such an atmosphere. He showed us up a grand staircase. It’s all cherrywood, he said brightly, fondling her ear. The halls were laid out with long thin carpets and portraits of elders, fusspots with cut-glass assholes, along with annually staged photographs of the assembled members going back to the invention of the art. While I made eyes at the history, rooms where Hölderlin and maybe Hannah Arendt had once stubbed a toe, they made them at each other. I soon left them to fucking.

The other café was across the river on the southern crest of the Odenwald. After bumbling around the evergreen forest until almost noon, I would arrive at the moment of my only drama for the day. Would I cross back through the wald, then scamper over the newer tram, bike, car, and pedestrian bridge, or else one of the two two-hundred-year-old ones downstream and visit my regular café, or would I stay in Neuenheim and enter a curious building I’d come across, the American University at Heidelberg, and stomp up the marbled stairs to the unwindowed, fluorescent-lit café inside, a place always struggling to attract any clientele other than university personnel? The nondescript café had no periodicals or newspapers except a university newsletter, but it had Americans. Much better-dressed, coiffed, and cut than I was, they sat in their seats while turning the pages of course books and loose-leaf notebooks, pastel highlighters in their soft hands. I pretended Deutschness and it worked, though I had many conversations in my head with those I watched. Attempting not to fantasize about seducing women, I concentrated my daydreams on forging friendships, finding someone to commune with about art. And for many, many minutes, I wouldn’t touch my tea and would dream falsity into my life, akin to talking to life-size cardboard cutouts in a basement, away from discriminating views.

Depending on the weather, maybe on less biting February or March afternoons, I would veer off to the Thingstätte in the deeper recesses of the Odenwald. I did this to commune with history, to try to feel something unimaginable and to stretch my humble mind—a touristy principle, but I had no camera, took no notes, sketched or painted no pictures. An abandoned egg-shaped amphitheater in the middle of the woods, it had been completed by the government in 1935—Goebbels spoke at the dedication. These sites, multidisciplinary outdoor theaters, were part of the Thingspiel movement, a craze in the early 1930s, but their popularity dwindled just as this one opened. After the Allies won the war, the U.S. Army held jazz concerts there. It was a solemn, well-kept place, and one entered at its high point because it was built into a cleft of forest: one descended from the last brick rows to the stage area, all in a wonderful, horrible symmetry, and when turning around one would look up to the exact point of arrival. I tried to understand the foolish glue of history through ruins often restored to some semblance of hey-day reality. There was nothing there for me, but I kept visiting, and each time there was even less. I shouldn’t have returned, but I’d long convinced it was myself the perfect place to shelter my plague for an hour.

I never asked for loneliness. It came to me prepackaged, the flip side of melancholy, boring easily through me. The French opportunity didn’t register as a decision to go to a farm and endure large stretches of complete solitude—it was the natural next step. If despair steered my destiny, then I would celebrate it. I’d prepared for my course of deprivations—months with only a few understanding people around would be a snap.

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In the Suavity of the Rock is available soon from Splice. You can order a copy here.

Greg Gerke is an essayist and writer of fiction, based in New York. His work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He also edits the online literary journal Socrates on the Beach. His story collection, Especially the Bad Things, and a collection of essays, See What I See, are available from Splice. Twitter: @Greg_Gerke