Schadenfreude, a Love Story by Rebecca Schuman

Author:Rebecca Schuman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

6.

Wohngemeinschaft

n. apartment share, abbr. WG, from dwelling and community.

ex. Triangular room in WG for illegal sublet, DM 300. Near transportation and entertainment. Electricity, hot water, ceiling-swing, some cigarettes, cultural metamorphosis, unlimited petty tyranny incl.

Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop.

The German landline issued its disconcerting monotone beep as I held my breath on the other end of the receiver. It was my worst exchange-student nightmare: calling a German stranger unsolicited; failing to be understood—or, worse, being sure that the German stranger was silently deriding my language abilities. Please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up. A rather counterproductive prayer, to be sure, as one doesn’t find a new place to live by letting the phone ring, hanging up, and then talking to nobody. On the fifth or six boooooop, a sharp voice answered.

Come on, Schuman, I told myself. Sei tapfer! Be brave! There was no way I was getting stuck out in the Freie Universität dorms, twenty-five miles from anything interesting, with only a bunch of dorko international students to keep me company in my dingy complex that was basically prison with beer. What the fuck was I going to do out there? Study? All the cool kids in my program had taken our possibly misguided directors’ offer to refund our dorm fees and search for housing independently in correspondingly cool Berlin WGs (Wohngemeinschaften, literally “living communities,” the German name for an apartment shared with someone who isn’t one’s family). And since I already lived in a WG with Gertrud, I couldn’t be expected to stop now and be subjected to such indignities as rules and not being cool. What the fuck use was living in the coolest city in the world, at its second-coolest time in its history (after Weimar, natürlich), if I wasn’t going to be cool? This was a potential tragedy. Too bad the only way to find a WG was to step directly into the gaping Nietzschean abyss of terror that was subjecting random potential roommates to my halting, phlegm-filled telephone Deutsch. This I did by answering ads placed in the Zweite Hand, a free weekly that was like Craigslist, but in print and with slightly fewer dick pics.

“Hallo? Halloooooooo?” repeated the voice on the other end, perturbed at my twenty seconds of heavy-breathing silence. My throat had once again coated itself as an immediate reaction to any attempt to speak German with anyone. I finally managed to croak out the single sentence that I’d been practicing under my breath all day: “Ist das Zimmer noch frei?” (“Is the room still available?”)

The voice at the other end paused, but not because he didn’t understand what I said.

“Äh … nein. Nicht mehr. Tut mir leid.” (“No. Not anymore. Sorry.”)

I assumed he paused because he was attempting to process someone being so terrifically rude. Germans are in some situations a direct people: as Gertrud was so kind to point out, they will think nothing of telling you that you have gained weight. But in other situations, they have ironclad laws of politeness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.