Better Than Fiction Page 5

  Picture my anxiety as we re-put-putted toward Zehlendorf. What if I came up blank twice? I took it for granted our Kleiststrasse house was no longer in the US government’s hands, the main reason I wanted Alex along. My own command of German is a memory of a sport I went out for and turned out to be no good at long ago.

  We knocked and some chunky kid aged about 12 came out. Feet mimicking mops with a sibling rivalry, hands stuck in pockets to hide their itch to get back to a video game. My inner Mowgli should have known right then he was American: ‘We be of one blood, you and I.’ But Alex valiantly spouted a paragraph or so of Berlinerisch to the effect that I’d once lived here and would like to see the Titanic’s engine room.

  The kid just rolled his eyes. ‘Can’t you say it in English?’ he said in the voice of a pubescent Jonah Hill. Looking at the 1999 edition of myself, I envied his confidence.

  His dad was CIA, I think. Alex learned later that our house had been considered such a plum that the American community protested at relinquishing it – but to whom, I wonder? Whichever mid-level Nazi panjandrum we’d evicted in 1945 to take it over wasn’t coming back. Neither was the well-to-do family in some minor Thomas Mann tale I’d always imagined building it in the first place before young, newly plumed Ernst rode off to the Battle of Tannenberg and didn’t return.

  Yet here it all was, unchanged. (Yes, my plump CIA-brat doppelganger let us in to rove.) The Jugendstil luxury of the dining-room picture window that lowered at the touch of a button to let in the garden’s smells. The bizarre little Bierstube in the basement, just down the cement corridor from the massively iron-doored bomb shelter.

  Here Cold War diplomats had once boozily swayed in the ornate front room, singing along to my father the song parodist’s masterpiece: ‘Meet Me at the Checkpoint, Charlie.’ Here a bespectacled young me had puzzled to mysterious words on the radio: ‘When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go …’

  Too Freudian: I couldn’t find my old bedroom. Knew it must be one of the three on the third floor, but something went blank. This one, that one? Which door had I barricaded to stave off going to the Lycée? Which floor had I painstakingly covered with toy soldiers jammed into plastic landing craft to recreate D-Day? As Kurt Vonnegut once put it about his own homecomings to Indianapolis, ‘Where is my bed?’

  Much as I hated the thought that all of Alex’s help had been for nothing, it may have been then and there that The Tin Can bit the dust. I’d never master my past, a prerequisite for turning it into fiction. All of a year later, I found myself writing a slapstick novel that featured the characters from TV’s Gilligan’s Island explaining their preposterous purchases on the 20th century. That was the one that got published instead, and Berlin never appears. A shrink would no doubt say it’s omnipresent.

  We flew out the next day. When we fastened our seat belts, the clicks reminded me of a joke I’d made long ago: ‘Foreign Service castanets.’ As the plane revved for takeoff, I glanced out the window – and there, yellowly glowing, was my Lycée, distant enough to look like its old self at last. I know it was an illusion, but it was as if it had crept up to the fence to say goodbye.

  Among Saudi Sands

  BY KEIJA PARSSINEN

  Keija Parssinen was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there for twelve years as a third-generation expatriate. She is a graduate of Princeton University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote fellow. Her debut novel, The Ruins of Us, for which she received a Michener-Copernicus award, was published by Harper Perennial in North America, and by Faber & Faber in the UK, Ireland, South Africa and Australia. It is forthcoming in Italy from Newton & Compton. She lives with her husband in Missouri.

  I learned how to leave home from a young age – how to pack a suitcase, how to do a final scan of the small room I shared with my brother. The rituals of departure came easily to me; I was an expatriate child. Where I was from and where I called home were not the same place.

  I remember the European vacations that served as stepping stones in my family’s yearly journey across the ocean from Saudi Arabia, where we lived, to Southern California, where my grandparents lived, and where my parents were technically from. Though first you’d have to trace them back through the valleys of Lebanon and the bustle of Tunisian souqs and the wadis of Jordan, and of course, through the salt-ridden Gulf town where they had settled their family.

  On the interminable flights to the States, we children made nests of thin airplane blankets on the floor where we were supposed to put our feet, but where instead we put ourselves, tucked away like carry-on luggage.

  The rhythms of that multi-legged trip, which spanned three continents, reverberated in me so that I came to define my year by that annual departure, when our family left on ‘repat’ – short for repatriation. And of course, there was always the return trip to the desert peninsula that had been my home since birth, which I and my siblings loved, but which my parents met with dread, passing the in-flight hours on the KLM flight by recounting events of the previous six weeks – the bottles of Italian wine imbibed beneath fragrant grape arbors, the walks in the foothills of the Alps, the electric-blue swimming pools and churning coastline of California.

  But I longed for the blast of humid air against my face when I descended the plane in Dhahran. To me, the pleasures of vacation never outweighed those of home, perhaps because I had a child’s limited appetite, or perhaps the desert had worked its way inside me – its dust and oil-flare air coating my lungs, giving me both asthma and the feeling that I belonged to the place.

  There was one voyage out, though, that did not involve return. In July 1992, Dad took early retirement. In a photo from that time, I’m looking out across the water, my face twisted up with the realization that these are the days of ‘lasts’ – last time swimming in the Arabian Gulf, last time racing up the giant dune at the end of the beach, last time seeing a camel crammed in the bed of a tiny Datsun truck, last time eating a shawarma on the dusty streets of Khobar.

  ‘Leaving for good’ was part of the contract of life in the Gulf – an understanding that Americans were only travelers in the holy peninsula, not permanent residents. When I arrived in Texas, I did what anyone would do when told s/he can’t have something: I yearned for the denied object, obsessed over it. Finally, after fifteen years of fostering nostalgia for my home, I was able to go back. My father had returned for work and could sponsor my visa.

  The return trip both excited and terrified me. September 11th had happened in my family’s absence, darkening my gilded memories. Now I recalled with clarity the armed men guarding the compound gates, the roar of fighter jets dividing the sky overheard. As a child, I had failed to connect these suggestions of violence to my narrative.

  In January 2008, as I stepped from the plane in Bahrain and felt that familiar blanket of humid air wrap itself around me, I wondered if I wasn’t inviting pain by attempting to return home. Would I even recognize the land of my childhood?

  For three weeks, I rotated between the households of Saudi friends. The trip marked my first extended stay in a Saudi household. I was welcomed heartily, spoiled with lavish meals and the generous attentions for which Arab homes are famous. And yet each family’s way of life was distinct. In the home of our more conservative friend, I sat down on the carpet and took a traditional meal with the women of the extended family, while the men gathered in a nearby room; in the Westernized home of another friend, we watched reruns of Grey’s Anatomy and sat around cracking jokes with no regard for the Kingdom’s strict sex segregation rules. Proximity proved to me that, for all its mystery and complexity, Saudi Arabia was a country filled with people trying to live their lives – to work, raise their children, and enjoy life in accordance with their beliefs.

  Certainly, tension lingered. One friend recounted where she was the day of the Khobar Towers bombing, and how she had felt the blast reverberate in her stomach, even at a distance of several miles. We drove by the Oasis com
pound, where twenty-two people had been killed in a 2004 hostagetaking, and observed the heavy concrete fortifications that had been put in place around the building.

  Additionally, I hardly recognized the city. When I was a child, there were no shopping malls, Italian coffee shops, or gourmet restaurants – only a few downtown stores that sold gaudy dresses and droopy restaurants hidden away in still droopier hotels. Like me, the Kingdom had grown up.

  One place remained nearly unchanged by time’s passage: the compound where we lived. It had always possessed a suburban neutrality, with its neat landscaping, cookie-cutter houses, and children playing in the street. I borrowed a bike from a friend, feeling my way around by instinct. I went to the hobby farm, where I’d owned an old Arabian horse named Xanadu, and to my school. Finally, I went to my old home, P-304 Prairie View. A woman gardened outside on the empty street. I told her I’d lived there once, as a girl. She invited me in, gave me water, showed me the backyard. The house and yard were smaller than I remembered. I thanked the woman and left.

  As an adult I found the compound to be less riveting than what lay beyond the barbed-wire fence – the pulsing, polylithic, complicated country of Saudi Arabia, with its ancient geography, tribal customs, outrageous wealth, and resolute faith. In the face of so much change and so many memories, I took comfort in the timeless desert and sea. My story of Arabia was a grain of sand nestled among a million more.

  In my novel, The Ruins of Us, one of my characters says, ‘The cure for nostalgia is return.’ Since my trip home, I don’t cling as ardently to my memories, don’t ache to reclaim the vanished land. I understand that while our homelands shape our story, they cannot be possessed. Ever forward we keep moving – people and countries, the world over.

  Quetzal

  BY FRANCES MAYES

  Frances Mayes had written six books of poetry and The Discovery of Poetry before she bought a house in Italy and spontaneously began writing prose. Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany, Every Day in Tuscany, two photo texts, the novel Swan and A Year in the World followed. The books are translated into over forty languages. Recently she gathered together the recipes from many feasts and published The Tuscan Sun Cookbook. She and her poet husband, Edward Mayes, live in North Carolina in a community of writers and artists, and in Cortona, Tuscany.

  As a Latino man stops next to me at the museum, I breathe in a scent that makes me turn toward him. I never knew if Carlos splashed himself with cologne or if he naturally smelled of lime, sugarcane, cloves, and some tropical yellow flower I imagined to be hibiscus until I smelled a hibiscus. The man near me also has black hair slightly curling over his collar, so I look at my shoes until the surge of memory subsides.

  The first time I saw Carlos, he, his wife Ingrid, and baby Marienöelle were getting out of their Mercedes with umpteen suitcases, parcels, umbrellas, toys, and garment bags. A young woman in a crumpled uniform, who turned out to be the nanny, carried the baby, while Ingrid scooped up as much as she could. Carlos looked at a key on his ring and started toward the door. He carried nothing but a sleek briefcase.

  I was sitting in a lawn chair with two new friends while our tiny children played in a wading pool. They’d found a turtle and were teaching it to swim. ‘Well, look at that,’ Michaela said softly. ‘Is this the prince of the realm?’ Carlos nodded to us as we took in his fawn-colored suit with over-stitching that announced the suit as Italian and tailor-made. Later, I’d see that he had twenty-seven others in his closet.

  As they all neared, we stood up and said hello, welcome to Lawrence Court. Did they need any help? Frances. Irene. Michaela. We’ve just moved in, too, late August, in time for fall semester. We were the first to live in the new graduate student apartments at Princeton. The Mercedes, the fine Italian suit, the nanny – my god, where would she sleep in the small two-bedroom apartment? My husband was on a scholarship in math and computer science. We planned to borrow what the generous funding didn’t cover. The others we met were in similar situations.

  I went inside to direct them to apartment #2, across the hall from mine. As Carlos opened the door, I caught a scented breeze of the tropics.

  ‘He smells like something to drink at the beach,’ I said as I sat back down. ‘Something with a twirly umbrella.’ The turtle lay upended, forgotten in the grass. Its legs worked but it could not right itself. ‘Sweetie, put the turtle back on the rock in the water. She’s very unhappy.’

  Ingrid brought the baby out and deposited her in the wading pool. Ingrid was monochromatic – pale, no-color hair, no lipstick, and with those glasses that darken. They’d come from Paris, where they’d both studied at the Sorbonne. Carlos had other degrees, she mentioned, one from the University of Bologna, another from the Escorial in Spain, where he was a classmate of the heir to the throne. While Carlos pursued a Ph.D. in economics, she would be studying theology at the seminary.

  ‘Is your husband Spanish?’ Irene asked.

  ‘Oh, no. He is Nicaraguan.’ Ingrid blew her nose into a tissue and crammed it into her pocket. ‘Allergy,’ she explained, waving her hand with a glance that included the whole apartment complex. Irene helped her haul in more luggage and Carlos did not come out again.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  The last time I saw Carlos, he stood by his green Mercedes limo on the tarmac at the Managua airport. ‘Your book has traveled too far with me.’ He handed me my long-lost copy of Yeats’s poems as I was climbing the stairs to my plane to Panama. He’d mentioned on the way that he was worried about skirmishes along the Honduran border. He was wearing a white shirt, immaculate as always, jeans and crude huaraches. His hair, combed back and wet from the shower, began to curl. As I turned back to wave, he squinted. I couldn’t tell whether or not he was smiling but as I look back from here, he stands starkly alone and I think he is biting his lower lip.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Brand-new Lawrence Court was a ring of two-storey apartment buildings around a grassy center. We could see the ‘dreaming spires,’ as Scott Fitzgerald described the university, across the fields where the children hunted for baby rabbits. Under the powerful force of propinquity, we made friends quickly. We organized a baby-sitting pool because most of us were intensely social and ready to party and to explore New York. The air seemed charged. The grad students (male – Princeton was just on the brink of allowing women) came from Iraq, Ireland, England, Germany, Sweden, Japan, and all over the U.S.

  Only a few of the women worked while the men studied. We volunteered at the university’s nursery school. We had a common room where we could gather for dinners. Often a couple would house-sit for major professors, so we entertained each other in the book-filled faculty houses as well. Although in our twenties, we already cooked with a vengeance. If you had the flu, someone brought over dinner. If you wanted to go to the city, someone always could pick up your child, who hardly would notice when you returned because so many children were around. My daughter, three, had an immediate best friend. Frank, my husband then, like most of the other men, felt on the verge of stepping up to an incredible future. So much brilliance in this druidic circle of red brick buildings.

  Without such a promised-land future, I nevertheless felt as though I’d landed in paradise. For my whole life, I’d wanted abroad. I felt exhilarated to meet Ann from Ireland, with her severe chiseled face and wry wit; Grete from Norway, with her apartment furnished with ceramics she’d made, and Turkish rugs from when her husband Ralph had taught at Roberts College in Istanbul; Michaela, from Nuremberg, with ethereal blonde beauty and family secrets from World War II; Lauren, a California dreamer with a radiant warmth. And Ingrid, sniffing into her tissue, carrying a tome on Heidegger or Kant, never participating in the parties. She would come outside while the baby played, and I’d ask her about Italy, where she’d studied and met Carlos. ‘We’d hike above Verona to a hut and make love,’ she said. My, my, I thought. How exotic for this critique-of-pure-reason, standoffish woman. If others joined us, she’d soon
tuck her tissue into the pages of Reinhold Niebuhr and wander off.

  I, too, always had a book and that was how I got to know Carlos one afternoon when he arrived home from class. ‘Ah, William Butler Yeats.’ He began to quote: We sat together at one summer’s end / that beautiful mild woman, your close friend / and you and I, and talked of poetry … The lines were from ‘Adam’s Curse,’ one of my favorite poems. He sat down, took my book and began to read aloud. Now and then he’d look up and I saw a sweetness, maybe just a little reaching out toward someone else who liked what he did.

  He was already considered odd and remote. ‘Could I borrow this sometime?’ he asked. ‘I’m without my books here. I do have some. Would you like to read Rubén Darío, a very beautiful poet of my country?’ He took a thin leather book out of his pocket and read. The Spanish was mellifluous (later I read him in translation and was not so enamored). I’d never met anyone remotely like Carlos. He spoke fluent Italian and German, as well as Spanish and English. His way of saying my country seemed more intimate than if I’d said the same. He was not at ease like the other guys, who came out and threw a football or shared a beer in the afternoons or met for pool, hitting the ball very hard if the subject of qualifying exams were in the air.

  On occasional afternoons we talked under the pines outside our building. ‘Garcia Lorca, Francesca, is the poet of the corazón.’ I had not heard of Neruda then. He knew poems by heart. He brought me the just-translated One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s hard to write how this affected me, a secret aspiring poet. Talking to Carlos, I had the (very bad) image of myself as a dry sponge suddenly dipped in spring water. By the time I finished reading Gabriel Garcia Márquez, I had a magnetic pull toward Latin America. Or Latin America as embodied by Carlos.