The Hardest Working Man in Germany

My first lesson with a German made me feel right at home. There is something about folks who don’t beat around the bush and get right down to business that seems very familial. Perhaps it’s because the Dutch and the Germans share an origin. At any rate, when it comes to German people, what you see is what you get or in my case what you hear is what you can expect. Germans have an amazing work ethic and they like to follow the rules, which is why calling Roland the Hardest Working Man in Germany is so significant. Everyone in Germany works hard, it’s their nature.

It was December and I saw Roland’s name on my January calendar. He had methodically gone through my schedule and scheduled six months of lessons twice a week in the same time slot. This alone alerted me to the fact that this was no average learner.

My first encounter with Roland was fairly typical. He sounded a bit nervous and was very modest about his level of English. But there was something about him, something that led me to believe that this was a man who had convinced himself that he couldn’t reach any higher but desperately wanted to.

Time after time he kept his appointment for his lesson and had his homework completed. Asking an adult to do 30 minutes of homework for a 30 minute English lesson is actually a taller order than you might imagine.  The majority of the people that I work with complete their homework 20 minutes before their lesson and sometimes not at all.  After working 40 hours a week, commuting for 35 to 45 minutes and then coming home to a family, even the most devoted learner sometimes fail to have completed their homework but never Roland, not once. If the instructions for an assignment were unclear he wouldn’t just put the homework aside and wait for the next time, Roland spent hours and hours until everything was perfect. I began calling him the “Hardest working man in Germany” and each time I could hear him glowing on the other end of the line.

Roland is in charge of shipping for a factory. My impression was often that he was not as well appreciated as he would have liked to have been. He is that guy that we all know who shows up every day and does his job so efficiently that no one notices him. He is that indispensable wheel that never needs grease. If he were gone everything would stop, but he never is and so we never notice. That is Roland.

When Roland completed his lessons he had made obvious improvements and he seemed to have gained tremendous confidence. I wish that I could say that he was promoted or got a big fat raise; I don’t know that to be true. I do know that he goes to work every day and does his job well. He goes home every night to his two sons and his wife. He helps to prepare dinner and he helps to clean up afterwards. Roland takes his family on holiday several times a year but he never leaves Germany. We won’t see Roland’s photo on the front of TIME magazine but the earth would not turn quite as smoothly without him.

The First Goodbye

As a child I felt a little underprivileged. My grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were on the other side of the earth. While my friends gathered with extended family on Thanksgiving eating turkey I was with my three brothers and my parents likely eating an Indonesian feast. It is only now that I realize that the gastronomic trade off was a good one.  Regardless it is still my sense that I truly missed out, that those family connections, those shared idiosyncrasies are something that we need in life to make us feel whole.

One of the other aspects of growing up without extended family is the lack of experience with loss. I never saw grandparents grow old and die. I never saw my aunts or uncles suffer illness and pass. They were simply names without real experiences attached to them that I began to hear with less frequency.

As a child I would lay awake in bed and worry about death. I worried that there might just be dark emptiness, nothingness. I simply could not comprehend it, it frightened me.  As an adolescent my questions evolved, what is life? Why are we here? What is it all about? I felt almost frantic. I was impatient to understand.

My environment provided many Christian answers to my questions but I just couldn’t grasp them. It just didn’t “take”. One day while sitting in church I heard the minister say something about eternal life and something clicked, a light turned on. I anxiously awaited the chance to discuss it with my father and I asked him if it was possible that eternal life was reincarnation. He thought about it for a moment, praised me for my questions and said, “Yes, I think it could be”. I felt so relieved. I felt all the angst of my years of wondering dissolve. As a parent I look back and realize what a gift he gave me. I don’t really know what his personal beliefs were but he respected me as an individual enough not to impose his beliefs on me. I believe that it was a true testimony to his intelligence to demonstrate that belief is holy, that religion is sacred, that individual faith is not something for anyone to question or disparage.

As I grew older my circle grew as did my experiences. Family friends began to pass. A friend of mine committed suicide after joking to me that it might be a solution to his problems. Although I had gained a philosophy about death, I still struggled with the idea of loss. I began to volunteer to the local Hospice, I needed to understand how people coped with knowing that the end was near, how their families functioned under the burden of that knowledge. I saw an entire range of experiences, none fit into a formula or mold and my questions lingered.

My husband is what my father in law, Logan called his fall crop. Andrew was born when his father was 45. Logan was an adopted child, his 15 year old biological mother had given him up for adoption in 1918. His adoptive mother was very disturbed and abusive. His adoptive father was simply absent.  When World War II began, he enlisted in the Army Aircorp and began receiving letters from a young woman named Dorace at “home”.  They married as soon as the war ended. His marriage provided him with the family for which he had always longed. He treasured his wife and children and was happiest when they were together.

Logan lived to be nearly 90. He battled heart disease, Parkinson’s and Bright’s disease. It seemed that death was often at his door and each time he rallied and death was turned away. Andrew and I often speculated that it was his strong desire not to leave what he held so dear to him that kept him alive.

In the February of his 90^th year Logan began to leave us. His heart began to fail and his breath became rapid and shallow. Logan began to slip in and out of consciousness. Hospice came and determined that it was a matter of days. The chaplain visited and gave Logan permission to “go”. The family was provided with an ample amount of morphine and instructions of how to make him comfortable. Hospice offered a full-time nurse, the family opted for a visit twice a day.

Each of us cancelled our work obligations and began quietly gathering each morning. Andrew’s mother Dorace offered tea and coffee, boxes of cereals and fruit were made available. Grandchildren were notified and those who had the ability to do so made travel arrangements. The children, after all had been saying their final goodbyes after each visit for years.

Each of us took turns sitting with Logan. Andrew’s sister in law sat holding Logan’s hand in one hand and a book of poetry in the other. She gently read, smiling and commenting on each piece. On occasion Dorace would enter the room and we took this as our cue to leave, the door would close and later Dorace would quietly reappear looking weary. In the evenings the house would fill with extended family and food. Spirits were poured and the party would begin. Our chairs lined Logan’s bedroom and people overflowed into the kitchen and living room. Stories were told, there was laughter and there were tears and then gradually as the night progressed the house began to empty. This continued every day and night for four days, each night the numbers increased.

Occasionally Logan had moments of what seemed like clarity. During the day when there were less than five or six of us he would wake, point at the ceiling and talk to people who were not there. Ever the host he insisted that his wife get a chair for the invisible man sitting on the floor. In one instance he pointed to the ceiling and said, “Come Dorace, this nice lady wants us to go with her”. Dorace responded tenderly by saying, “you just go right ahead with her, I can’t join you just now”.

On the fourth night we said our goodbyes and returned home. Andrew’s sister Jane, her daughter Carina and Carina’s husband stayed the night with Dorace. Our phone rang at about 2:00 the next morning. It was Dorace letting us know that Logan was gone. We returned to Dorace’s house which seemed so strangely quiet after the evening’s merriment. The coroner was called and we waited. There aren’t many words to say when one waits for a coroner at 3:00 a.m. There are gentle touches, comforting glances and a peculiar stillness.

The coroner arrived in a minivan. He was wearing a suit jacket, slacks and a tie. A young woman wearing slacks accompanied him. I don’t know what I expected and I’m not sure that any vehicle, type of clothing or combination of people would have seemed more normal to me. Dorace said goodbye to her husband’s body for the last time, he was placed in a type of heavy, black, zippered bag, transferred to a gurney and wheeled to the waiting minivan. I exited out of the back door, stood outside alone and watched them load the body. The air was very still and cold, yet I was surprised to see my breath. Logan’s body was loaded. The couple shut the doors, reentered the van, and pulled away. The only sound was the cold crunch of the gravel beneath the tires.

Dear Herrmann

An old Postcard found on Google Images of Eltviller Aue, an Island on the Rhine which served as a WWII work camp.

 My father was 16 when the Germans invaded the Netherlands. He was captured and imprisoned at age 17. His mother was of Jewish origin. Had this fact been known he might not have lived through the war. My father rarely discussed his imprisonment with his children or my mother until later in his life. I think that they were memories better left in the past. We had many students from Germany visit our home and my father treated them with the same warmth and grace he extended to any guests in our home. He however, did not forget his captures or the war.

My father did share one wonderful story about his imprisonment. My father was held prisoner on a small island on the Rhine. According to my father the island was owned by an elderly countess who lived in a grand mansion on the island. She was loyal to the Nazi party and happily provided her farm and out buildings as a work camp for prisoners. There were a few livestock and a vineyard that the prisoners tended to but was strictly not intended for their consumption.

There were prisoners from several countries in Europe and my father used this opportunity to perfect his language skills. The other prisoners took him under their wing, appreciated his youth and his desire for knowledge.  One prison guard, named Herrmann took a particular liking to my father and allowed him to listen to the BBC. Herrmann also allowed him the use of his row boat and directed him to a nearby orchard where he picked fruit to share with the other prisoners. He also looked the other way when the prisoners treated themselves to roast suckling pig one evening after they were able to convince the countess that she had indeed miscounted. Herrmann also tutored dad with his German so efficiently that on one occasion when he left the island and was questioned, he was able to convince his confronter that he was German.

The island prisoners were eventually liberated by Canadian soldiers. I don’t know what became of the countess. I imagined that she was arrested because upon his departure my father helped himself to numerous bottles of her private reserve which was used as currency for his return to Den Haag.

My father never forgot Herrmann’s kindness and thought of him often. In the mid-nineties with thanks to the internet, he finally located a phone number. He called the number and when a woman answered he tentatively used his best German to explain who he was and who he was trying to locate. The woman was Herrmann’s wife.  She reported that Herrmann too had spoken of my father and had even gone to Holland in search of him. Sadly, she reported, he had died only a few months before.

Mama Mia

I keep my relationships with my learners very appropriate. They spend their time with me and it is very personal but it is an English lesson and not a dating line. I also have a perfectly good husband of my own in real life.

I did have one Italian learner who has the most beautiful voice, the most impeccable manners and the loveliest accent. I rarely see their faces and in this case my mind ran wild.

I imagine him to be about six foot tall. He wears tailored Armani suits and Italian leather shoes. He often wears blue shirts because he knows it’s my favorite color. He is always thoughtful and romantic and never emits gaseous odors. When I call him, he loosens his tie and unbuttons his collar. He props his foot upon his desk and leans back in his chair, smiles and says, “Ciao Bella”. I feel butterflies when I hear his voice and fan myself with my hand.

Occasionally during a lesson his phone will ring and he will say in his lovely accented English,

 “Ingrid, I am so sorry, excuse me for a moment. I must take this call”

“No please, take your time” I reply knowing that I will hear his melodic Italian.

 He gently sets the phone down and I hear, “sì, sì, io sarò lì alle 8:00, si prega di assicurarsi che sia caldo e sai come mi piace il prezzemolo mescolato in bene. Sei riuscito a prendere il mio pane preferito dal forno? sì, sì ... bene. Oh, e ho qualche lavanderia che mi piacerebbe uscire con te. Ricordate per favore l'ultima volta che vi era di amido troppo e chaffed mio collo. Ahhh e la prego di far uscire la vita dei miei pantaloni neri, sono un po 'stretto per me. Penso che il materiale ridotto ahhh e ho dimenticato di dirti che il mio posto in cravatta, non è riuscito a rimuovere l'ultima volta. ha bisogno di più lavoro. sì, sì, che sarà buono. Ci vediamo allora, Ciao, mamma.”

 I of course understand nothing that I’ve heard but it doesn’t matter because I only hear beautiful music. Wait, did he just say something about his mother?

Later I make my confession to my Italian friend Gia. Gia is older than I and much less idealistic. She lives in Rome, has never married and works as a goverment employee. She insists on telling me all of the details about her recent bladder surgery and refuses to use proper medical terms, although I offer them, she chooses instead to use words, like “pee pee”. She is a serious smoker and her voice is gruff. It is not very complementary but I can only describe her as a bit crusty.

“Gia, I have the most beautiful Italian male learner, I think I have a crush on him”

“Crush? What is this? What does this mean Ingrid, Crush?”

“Oh sorry, It’s a silly way to say that I am a little in love, you know like a school girl?”

“Ingrid, you have seen this man?”

“Oh, of course not. But I know he is, he used to play Rugby and he is so refined, so polite. I just know that he is beautiful. And you know Gia this is not real, I’m not running off to Italy or anything, I’m just fantasizing, having fun”

 “Ingrid, don’t you know Italian men are not so beautiful he is short and bald. His spills food on his tie and he has a big belly. He goes to his mother’s house every night for dinner and every night before he goes to bed he leaves his dirty underpants on the floor.”

“Gia, how is this possible, Ive seen the Italian futball team they are all tall, athletic and beautiful”

“Ingrid, these are the only handsome men in Italy, there are only 12 and even they still ask their Mama’s to do their laundry”.

I am destroyed.