Wife Living Dangerously by Sara Susannah Katz

Author:Sara Susannah Katz [KATZ, SARA SUSANNAH]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780446559157
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

I’m not sure what to expect when I unfold the paper Evan gave me. What if it isn’t a medieval poem but a love letter, a passionate declaration, or something explicitly sexual? But when I finally allow myself a glimpse I see that it is in German.

I find Evan’s office number in the campus directory. “There’s a problem,” I say, fully aware that this new project gives me license to call him anytime I crave his voice, which I don’t plan to do but the option is tantalizing. “This poem, it’s in German.”

“It is? Oh. Sorry. I meant to give you the translation. I’ve got it right here on my desk. Why don’t you stop by? Or I can drop it off.”

“No, that’s okay,” I say, rubbing my wedding band like a talisman. I don’t want to see him. I already feel myself slipping and I can’t let it happen, not me, not ever. “Just put it in campus mail. No rush.”

I look again at the poem, letting my eyes scan the hard consonants and clipped syllables in search of a familiar word. I’ve always been fairly good with languages. I decide to try decoding it myself, now. The prospect of finding some provocative message in Evan’s note is too thrilling to bear. My heart thumps as I climb the dark stairwell to the Bentley library, sequester myself in a carrel in the back, and begin picking apart the paragraph with a German-English dictionary I’ve found in the reference section.

Is aber daz dir wol gelinget, so daz ein guot wip din genade hat, hei waz dir danne froiden bringet, so si sunder wer vor dir gestat, halsen, triuten, bi gelegen.

In forty minutes I have only managed to get through the first few words and there is no love message hidden here. In fact, the passage makes no sense. “However with it hope for success, with it one guot (?) recover or recuperate from thence with your…” This cannot be modern German.

I am ready to abandon the project. Then I remember Mrs. Hoffman who owns the German bakery. I recall that she offhandedly referred to her “other life” when she taught Germanic languages and linguistics at the University at Gottingen. She and Albert were fired in 1935. They fled first to Cuba, then the United States in 1956. “We didn’t care so much about losing our jobs,” she told me. “We were happy to escape with our lives. Professor, baker, I care? As long as we were alive, and we were together.”

Albert Hoffman died of a heart attack last year and Nina took over the shop, the only real bakery left in this town, all the rest having been extinguished by chain supermarkets and their fake bakery departments where nothing is ever mixed from scratch, just thawed and heated or simply transferred from the back of a truck. I loved everything about Hoffman’s, the heavily shellacked, slopey hardwood floors, the prim white cardboard boxes and the thin cotton string used to

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