A month, a week, and a day

We have now been in Berlin five full weeks. It is astonishing how well the girls have adjusted. They all seem to take it for granted that we should yank up roots in New England and settle, briefly, in a European capital. Today on my Daddy-Daughter-Date with Eli I asked whether she was glad we had come. “Yes,” she said. “At first I thought I wouldn’t like it”—and by this point she had assumed a faux-British accent—“but then I discovered that I love it!” What’s not to love?

On Tuesday LJEK made a second attempt to comfort the convalescent Sister Grunewald with cookies and company. Armed with the correct address, the ladies this time reached their goal. Sister Grunewald, former matron of the Freiburg Temple and quondam teacher of English and German, recently underwent a complicated leg surgery, and the medication prescribed for her recovery puts her at risk of fainting. She was grateful for the visit, but Lia worried she got up and down too often to seek entertainment for the girls. The girls, in any case, were highly entertained. Sister Grunewald had waiting before them a table of cookies and grape juice in goblets. Katharine was most particular to place her goblet delicately on her coaster. Eli luxuriated on a balcony filled with flowers. All the girls played enthusiastically with a mun-chi-chi doll and a Noah’s ark kit. Lia lovingly surveyed bookshelves stocked with leather volumes of Goethe, Novalis, and Heine, and chatted with Sister Grunewald about family history. Sister Grunewald’s ancestors are traced back to 1250 and were friends with Martin Luther, from whom some of them even received letters. Lia bragged that one of her ancestors stole a horse from Martin Luther.

On Wednesday I took Eli to visit a neighborhood “Kita” (an abbreviation for a behemoth of a German noun meaning “place-where-you-leave-your-kids-during-the-day”), where she’s like to spend her days after Julia starts school. Elementary school in Germany starts only with first grade; before that kids ranging from infancy to age six can go to a literal “Kindergarten.” What this means is that Eli will spend her kindergarten year in a playroom in Berlin rather than a classroom in New Haven. She was a bit nervous to visit her probable “school,” but she forgot her anxiety when she found the dress-up corner. On, immediately, went a bright pink gown. From then on, Eli was in raptures. We participated in “Morgenkreis” (morning circle), which involved my sitting cross-legged (what we called “Indian-style” in a my anti-[not just un-]PC elementary days) for longer than my nearly-three-decade-old legs could comfortably bear, and ineffectually translating for Eli a story being read about what looked like a blue elephant with streamers in place of ears.

When it came time to play outside, I hoped Eli would start to interact with the other children. She ultimately did, but with mixed results. I smiled with quiet satisfaction when Eli trotted off with a group of three other girls. I kept my distance, hoping Eli would make friends in spite of the language barrier. As I observed, though, it became clear that one of the girls was something of a Mean Girl. She yanked toys from her peers; she elbowed her way to a favorable position at the side of what was effectually a water trough; she held her nose high as an emblem of pride and tossed her hair in an assertion of authority. Pretty soon she and Eli had a dispute around the water trough. Eli snatched a leaf that the Mean Girl had been floating in the trough and raced off with it in my general direction, her eyes twinkling with merriment. Mean Girl pursued in high dudgeon. Eli gave me the leaf, I returned it to its owner, and both girls returned to the trough, Mean Girl at a gallop, Eli at a trot. Mean Girl hovered protectively over the trough when Eli arrived back. With consummate insouciance, Eli lifted her right leg over the rim of the trough and dashed it down with a vengeance into the center of the trough. Eli’s adversary, of course, was soaked. Mean Girl ran to me, whining that “Sie hat mich nass gemacht!” Not knowing the Turkish for “Serves you right,” I said “Es tut mir leid” with the most sympathetic face I could muster. I then turned to Eli and covered my inner pride with a face hardened in severity. Social integration may take time; but good to know at the outset—what one could never have doubted—that Eli can hold her own.

On Thursday LJEK visited Antje Wenke, another sister in the ward, who regaled the girls with books and games and magnificent homemade quiet books whose materials must have cost in excess of a hundred Euro (we sometimes day “Eurodollars” when we are trying to act like obnoxious Americans—i.e., when I am imitating my father-in-law). I’m not sure how the girls will ever recover from being serially spoiled by the members of our ward.

On Saturday Lia engaged in a surpassing rare personal indulgence: she went shopping by herself to buy clothes for herself. But even Lia’s indulgences are strictly regulated and abstemiously carried out. She allotted herself only fifty Euro (actually taking sixty, in case of emergency) with which to buy a shirt, a skirt, and two pairs of shoes. She would spend no more than her budget allowed and buy nothing her list did not authorize. Needless to say, she succeeded. It is equally superfluous to add that she looks stunning in her new articles. (I can already anticipate the comments from my inestimable sisters-in-law, screaming for pictures.) The girls and I meanwhile watched The Prince of Egypt in German—well, I watched for as long as my eyes can endure a flickering screen: about twenty minutes—and I served them a gourmet dinner of cheese quesadillas. I’m not sure how to interpret the shouts of jubilation and relief with which the girls invariably greet Lia after her return from a venture alone into the broad, wide world.