Without Care

It has been quite a week. I have finally settled down to work and Lia and the girls have at last begun to party in earnest. I've made my home at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin on Potsdamer Strasse, which I find more congenial and useful than the scattered libraries of the Free University campus. German libraries are curious places. One can bring into them only what one can carry. Backpacks are flatly forbidden and, in some libraries, so are water bottles. At the Staatsbibliothek one receives, upon entrance, a card stamped to indicate that one has brought a PC with him or, if one enters with a stack of books (or even just one book), a card stamped to indicate how many volumes one has and how many of them come from the Staatsbibliothek, how many from other libraries, and how many are one's own books. One assumes they distinguish between books from other libraries and private volumes merely for the sake of thoroughness--or perhaps just for the fun of it, as Germans understand fun.

My favorite thing about the libraries here has to be the ear-plug dispensers. Now German research libraries are already as silent as the Arabian wastelands on a windless night, but should one wish to block out the aggravating hum of one's own laptop, or the irritating click of one's own typing, one can do so conveniently for the economical price of a single Euro. Many do so.

There are also some curious rules of etiquette. One of them is, that if one has a cold, he had better blow his nose, on the spot, like the blast of a thousand trumpets than sniffle once or twice in an effort to put off nose blowing until one's next trip to the restroom. This I learned to my sorry at the Free University law library on Monday morning. All around me, afflicted souls were pulling cleenex from their pockets and firing into them like so many brass cannons. I had a bit of a cold, too, but being short of tissues I sniffed a time or two before giving up and heading to the restroom to blow my nose. I was stopped on my way by an otherwise pleasant looking female student who accosted me thus: "Excuse me: You need to use a tissue." As a matter of fact, I was on my way to do just that, but was so taken aback by what in my native land would be deemed an act of astonishing rudeness that I could only answer, "Ja?" "Ja," she sternly responded. "Danke." And then she was off. Of course I thought later of all the witty and withering things I could have said--but ah, l'esprit des l'escaliers.

More interesting by far than my misadventures in the library have been the ladies' escapades in the Hauptstadt. On Tuesday they spent a long day roaming the neighborhood checking out potential schools for Julia and Eli. It's a complicated process, rendered more difficult by the fact that many of the schools are on summer break and therefore totally incommunicado. It is hard to examine a school whose doors are locked and whose email contact address fires back an automatic response indicating that they will be delighted to read one's message the day before the term starts. Some of the schools close by look very promising--one that specializes in music and storytelling for Eli, one that emphasizes theater for Julia--and others much less so. We hope we can get the girls into the former.

On Wednesday Lia and the girls--hereafter to be chiquely styled as L-JEK--went to our neighborhood library and romped on its adjacent playground, naturally equipped with a zip-line. (Speaking of things chiquely-styled, I should add parenthetically that when Lia sported the wild blue dress my mom recently gave her to church on Sunday, some hefty German sisters, stopped her to exclaim, "Wow! Du siehst so chic aus!") Public libraries are friendlier by orders of magnitude than academic ones. We've loaded up on bi-lingual German-English children's books and a handful of children's movie DVD's, that we cruelly make the girls watch in German. Actually, I'm the only cruel one; soft-hearted Lia lets them watch in English, though she claims that's because she can't get the machines to roll auf Deutsch.

Thursday brought us a touch of home: unremitting rain from sunrise to sunset, the kind of steady, monotonous drizzle we thought only New Haven could supply. Lia, inventive as ever, took the girls to a local craft story where they stocked up on art supplies and then came home to while away the gloomy hours by making masks. This was fun as well as practical. In a metropolis like Berlin, one is liable to be invited to a masquerade ball at a moment's notice; one can never be too much prepared.

On Friday the rain continued. But rather than sit at home viewing the wall, L-JEK bestrided the Metro-Bus to view the city. They rode down town were they visited Berlin's famous Galleries Lafayette mall complex. Talk about chic! Even the bathrooms were stylish--so stylish indeed that Lia snapped pictures of them. She was really stepping into her photographical stride when the idea occurred to her that something about the spectacle of a dazzling young mother conducting a photo shoot of her darling progeny within the precincts of a public restroom might strike outside observers as odd. An inner war broke out between her maiden and her married surnames. In an uneasy truce, the Suttner in her held its ground on the point of taking pictures at all; but the Collings in her flatly forbade any pictures of the flashy toilets.

After the mall, L-JEK felt some need for cultural purification, and they visited the so-called "French Cathedral," outside of which, as it happens, a local newspaper team was working on a story, the thesis of which was that Berliners (the citizens, not the donuts) know how to have fun regardless of the rain.

The team was staging some pictures of two ten-year-old girls gingerly hopping in some puddles. Our girls needed no more encouragement than that of example, and they precipitated themselves into the same puddles with dash and abandon. They splashed and frolicked, stomped and roared. They squealed for pleasure, they cooed for merriment. The camera woman knew she had a new subject. The girls knew they had a new audience. An impromptu photo shoot followed, producing an adorable picture of Katharine, laughing mid-leap and sounding a barbaric yawp through the streets of Berlin. The team promised Lia a copy of the picture, which might, they said, appear in the next day's paper. Apparently it did not; in any case, they didn't send the picture. The girls were also interviewed. Hoping to hear a positive spin on the rainy weather, overflowing from the exuberance of youth, one reporter asked the girls, "And what do you think of the rain?" "I despise it!" bellowed Julia. "I abominate it!" thundered Eli. "I love it!" burbled Katharine. Asked to elaborate, Julia moaned that, "When it rains we never get to do anything--we just have to stay inside all day." This, understandably, elicited a raised eyebrow from Lia. When Katharine was asked to elaborate, she said something about Ariel being eaten by a shark and raced back to the puddles.

Saturday morning, at long last, we went to Sans Souci, the Potsdam palace of King Frederick the Great of Prussia. All three girls wore the hand-made dresses Lia loving made for them as an absolute precondition of their spending a year in Germany. They were the darlings of many eyes as they pranced around the park. Men of all ages tipped their hats to Julia, and she responded each time with an exaggerated curtsy. Some sneaked furtive photos of the girls. Many let forth cries of delight--cries of delight, that is, as such things go among so staid and stolid a folk--about the "Prinzessinnen." But among a gaggle of teenage girls from Georgia--the beleaguered neighbor of Russia, not of South Carolina--Julia, Eli, and Katharine found an assembly of ardent adorers. When they saw the girls, the Georgians squealed in pleasure; they squeaked in rapture; they chirruped in praise. They circled around them like a band of pilgrims round a sacred shrine. They reached for their cameras like the most unprincipled of paparazzi.

And our humble children ate it up disgracefully. They posed, they preened, they bowed. They batted their eyes, they flittered their skirts, they hugged one another as an irrefutable proof that they were as heart-warmingly sweet as they were heart-conqueringly fair. The Georgians learned their names and sounded their praises. Feeling impish I engaged them in conversation. The girls really were princesses, I explained. I was linked to the British royal family on my mother's side but, nauseated with the burdens and trappings of royalty, I found relief traveling the world with my family, posturing as an American tourist.

Okay, so I didn't really say any of that, but the girls and their admirers were quite a spectacle. The girls proved that the best way to secure a maiden's devotion is to stroke her vanity. They became quite as much fans of the Georgians as the Georgians were of them. We crossed paths a couple more times during the day, with mutual explosions of cheering on both sides.

Sans Souci is gorgeous and deservedly famous. The gardens are stately and elegant, vast and geometrical. There are some lovely, rolling open fields. It would be the perfect residence for an enlightened despot--and the perfect site for a football game.