American Ghost by Hannah Nordhaus

Author:Hannah Nordhaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

sixteen

LOW SEASON

The Montezuma, New Mexico, hotel and hot springs, 1888.

Dana Chase, Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 56980.

A hundred and twenty-odd years later, I followed in Julia’s and Bertha’s footsteps—this time seeking not a cure , but a ghost. I boarded a plane, not a train, to Bad Pyrmont, and it wasn’t July but late October—low season. Like Bertha, however, I brought my mother—not because she suffered from any noticeable neurasthenic ailment, but because she speaks German.

My mother was a good sport in abetting my quest for Julia. She thought my ghost-hunting efforts amusing, if silly. It was the search for my father’s German family history that lay closer to her heart. She had studied German for many years as a young woman. I had studied it for a few weeks when I was in kindergarten and had learned only to count to six. So I deputized her as my translator and travel companion and dragged her along on my hunt. Our first task was to meet a local historian named Manfred Willeke.

Herr Willeke—we never addressed each other by first name—lived in Lügde, Julia’s Lügde, which was only a few kilometers from Bad Pyrmont. By happy coincidence, he was the designated historian for both cities, and he agreed to help me trace Julia’s path in both. Arranging to meet with Herr Willeke had had its roadblocks, however: he spoke little English, and I spoke even less German. After making contact, I wrote an email to him in English confirming our appointment. He responded in German, asking why I insisted on visiting on a day when he was busy. “Why have you not taken this into account?” he wrote. “It is a pity that apparently everything is so strange and does not seem to fit when I wanted so much to help you. . . . I doubt that we’ll see you at all.”

“No, no!” I wrote back, in German this time, with the help of my mother. “I’ll come whenever you can see me!” Our relations from then on were quite cordial, provided they were in German. He signed his emails thus: Herzliche Grüße aus dem Tal der sprudelnden Quellen—Warm greetings from the valley of bubbling springs. The valley of Bad Pyrmont—Lügde’s valley, Julia’s valley: what a lovely spot it portended.

Germany had never before appealed to me as a vacation destination. I always pictured a gray and industrial landscape, flattened by war and brutalized by modernity. My mother’s father, a Baltimore Jew of eastern European ancestry who had watched the Holocaust from afar in horror, disapproved of all things German. My grandfather refused to buy German cars, or chocolate, or anything else from that hated place, and he tried, rather pointedly, to steer my mother from studying German in high school—he urged her to take French.

But she loved the solidity of the German language—the clear and structured grammar, the way the words were contained in little consonantal boxes. And it was also a not-too-dramatic way to prove herself a rebel.

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