On Sunday we’d go to Eberhard’s house in the country. It’s actually his mom’s house, and he’s been living there for years since she had a stroke and can’t live by herself. He’s also got a house across the road which used to belong to his aunt and now is in a state of disrepair, and that’s where I stay when I visit. It’s no place you’d want to sleep in or inhabit, but I do it to be polite.
I asked mom again why she decided to stay in Germany. She said because it was so hard for her to leave their last house, in Pennsylvania, she didn’t have the energy to move again. John left most of the work to her when they moved and it broke her heart to leave that house; she never got over it. And because she’d spent the last year of John’s life caring for him, after he died she just wanted someone to care for her. That’s when Eberhard showed up. Then after years of going back and forth to his mom’s house she got tired of it: tired of the sudden, odd mistreatment she had to endure from his mom, the inexplicable eye rolling that just started one day, the funny faces she’d make, how she always frowned. Seemed a pity she kept holding on for so long I often thought, and sometimes uttered aloud, to which my mom always agreed.
It was an hourlong drive to Eberhard’s and we’d take the convoluted route as prescribed by the navigator, the route we always questioned but never disobeyed, through villages and roundabouts with speed traps that all looked the same. The car was registered to Eberhard so whenever mom got a ticket he got the notice, which happened too often it seemed, and always came with a story. And it rankled Eberhard on two levels: one, because he’s an ex cop and two, he’s cheap.
The car like everybody else’s gave clues about its owner by the license plate. The LB denoted where the car was registered (Ludwigsburg), the 1605 his birthday (May 16), the EK his initials (Kerker). Knowing this we scrutinized the plates on all the cars in mom’s village looking for irregularities, cars registered to non-locals. Then we theorized the long form name for where the car was registered and identified the ones we could (Tü for Tübingen, Vai for Vaihingen), a kind of word game.
But it was also the small town mindset to be on guard for outsiders, to pry. And part of that was because mom’s neighbors all looked out for one another. Everyone in town knew my mom’s name. Often people came up to us and she’d say hello but not introduce me because she couldn’t remember their names or the source of their acquaintance. I’m the alien, mom said. It’s what it said on her passport: Resident Alien.
So there was an odd mix of mom feeling both at home here in Germany but always like a foreigner too. Lying on the sofa in her reading room as mom did her daily afternoon word games on her tablet, it occurred to me how thick the old stone walls were on mom’s house: they muffled the sound of the Germans on the sidewalks below, the traffic on the 27. Even the church bells seemed muted, and sounded farther away. And that made me feel both connected to the place but removed from it too. Mom must feel like that every day, I thought. Time would take on a different aspect living like that, as would life.
Bill Pearse 
The number plate game is rather like what is like to live in a country where you have limited language. Part detective, part bemused observer, part child.
The last para worked nicely for me, Bill. The nearness of couch to street in an village built around ancient farms and sheep tracks, separate but close.
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Thanks Bruce! Back from Eberhard’s place in the country just now and feels good to be home. Hope your evening is/was good, will connect again Dienstag!
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