Another weekend came and went. Saturday morning was a mad rush because my alarm didn't go off, and I woke up to the jolt of having to catch a train in less than 30 minutes without having packed the previous night. Made it anyway.
After a month or so of torturing each other via ICQ, which couldn't seem to bring anything to a satisfactory or decisive end, Martina and I finally hung out in Kaiserslautern and kicked it into friend mode for good this time. The main event was an American house party on Saturday night.
It was like walking into America after a five month absence. College football was playing in the living room and Air Force guys with Texas drawls were sitting around watching. There was a keg, and jungle juice in big gatorade coolers in the kitchen. Not only were people actually playing cards, they were playing Spades. Suddenly I could talk with anyone without worrying about being understood.
But I still felt a bit out of place. It wasn't just that everyone was a bit simple, which in itself can be okay, but that every conversation seemed like an apology for the person being the way they are, or worse yet an attempt to believe ones own lies about oneself by sharing them with a third party. Is superficial the word I am looking for here? Maybe. But it seemed to me to go beyond superficiality into the realm of deliberate self-deception, of dishonesty about this matter of who one really is. Perhaps, I thought later, the difference is that more complicated people pretend so well that a listener doesn't notice.
And then there was some sort of subtle cultural difference between us. One guy took me for a German, wanted to know if I was "doitch." I think it must have been my clothes, which have been drifting in a European direction too slowly for me to notice myself. Though most of them had been there for a year or two, they could hardly speak a single word of German, making my barely passable conversational German seem like an achievement, which it is not. But all this is not really surprising once you realize that these people have basically been living in America all this time, a little inland American colony known as an army base, and have never had to leave their comfort zone.
The landlord was an interesting character though. He was apparently good friends with all the guys, brought up a bottle of vodka upon their request, emptied ashtrays for people. He was short, with intense blue wall-eyes, and spoke English so well that I swore I detected a Midwest accent (or lack of accent as we like to think back home) in him. He had interesting stories to tell which completely made up for the fact that he suddenly began describing a painful back operation and that I wound up looking at X-rays.
The next day we did basically nothing except walk through the woods for a couple hours, during which I tried to articulate the indefinable problems that have been accumulating in my head. The forest was constantly changing character. Paths split, merged, disappeared altogether, led nowhere. I had no idea where we were most of the time or where we were going. In the end, I only managed to air the problems, and poorly at that. Nothing was solved but it didn't really matter because someone was at least listening to them. That's a start.
After we said goodbye I realized something: I have a lot of respect for this girl. I don't know why this should be surprising, but it is. Maybe I'm a misogynist. All I know is that there are precious few members of the female race that I can say this about. And I never expected to think this way at the end of a relationship, because relationships tend to slowly erode my respect for the other person.
Martina is probably the strongest girl you'll ever meet. She doesn't pity her fate in life, isn't a feminist, or even a post-feminist, whatever that crap means. If she wills herself to do something she does it...she wants to run a marathon in the near future and she will. She doesn't need other people in order to be happy in her life, much less a man. Basically there is almost nothing that she is afraid of.
To this end I asked her about bearing children, if she was scared of it, or maybe freaked out about the idea of having something grow inside of her. She laughed and told me she thought it would be cool, and considered herself luckier than a man because she would be much closer to the child than a man could ever be during those nine months. I asked her if she was afraid of the pain of giving birth. It was over soon she said. And added, laughing, "besides, I think it would be fun, because you get to yell as loud as you want the whole time."
At times it goes beyond respect and verges on awe.
Posted by Alan at October 14, 2002 10:03 PM