Nonfiction by Grace Zimmerman
He is living my dream. He is my favorite cousin and the only one I knew by name. He had always been a specter, a mythical legend my former child mystified. I wasn’t sure he existed at all. We spoke of him like he was no longer with us, nay, that he was somewhere better. Jeremy in Germany, it rolled off the tongue so well. Jeremy in Germany lived in an untouchable place. Jeremy in Germany didn’t go to family functions. Jeremy in Germany could only be contacted via a rolled-up note in a bottle thrown into the sea. Jeremy in Germany was boarding a plane with whatever luggage he could carry, and he wasn’t looking back.
Most of the luggage would get lost in the twisted knots of the airport and Jeremy would be in Germany with only the crumpled-up socks and shirts he had prudently stashed in his knapsack. The airport was a spectacular shade of gray with notes of gray and more gray. The ceiling was unusually bulbous, and the walls were a thick sheet of glass revealing the vast concrete tundra of the airport taxiway. There wasn’t anything especially foreign about the foreign ground he stood on. It all looked the same as far as he could tell. Maybe he got on the wrong plane.
When he left the airport, he would enter Braunschweig, the self-proclaimed city of science that was more famous for gingerbread and sausages to the average tourist. It would be his new home for the foreseeable future, a place where he’d conduct his environmental research for the grand city of science. He could have done it anywhere and yet he chose there.
The trees looked identical to the ones he had in Wisconsin; the grass was still green, the sky still grey, the air still cold. The country greeted him with rain, a bitter downpour which he convinced himself was a good omen because it had to be. Jeremy was in Germany having lunch with his new co–workers over schnitzel and friendly conversation and the only thing he could think about was the rain. There was a man waiting at a street corner who was so insistent he obeyed the red traffic light that he would rather get his suit wet than cross the street when he wasn’t supposed to. The service trucks that waded through the swampy streets had flat snouts and low carriages that made the trucks look small and dainty compared to the gothic brick buildings that billowed over them. The sound of bike tires dashing through puddles on cobblestone roads and the tender hum of a railway blanketed under rainfall—it was all around him. It’s not like he’d never seen rain before. There was nothing particularly alien about it. But somehow, it felt different here. The menu was a mishmash of English and German, his colleague’s conversations were a mishmash of English and German, his own brain was a mishmash of English and German. Maybe he shouldn’t have gotten on that plane.
Jeremy stumbled his way into a shared apartment where he lived amongst the Germans. He practiced a Canadian accent in the mirror the first couple of nights just in case he ever needed to pretend he wasn’t American. The Germans didn’t seem to mind, jumping on the opportunity to practice their English whenever he lingered too long in a doorway. He couldn’t seem to escape it. His roommates were relatively private—most Germans were—and the damp quiet that hung between them whenever a word didn’t translate permeated long after the initial awkwardness. Jeremy would chuckle half-heartedly, escape out the back door, and ride his borrowed bike to the grocery store, his frizzy hair flailing in the breeze.
The grocery stores had a special American section with overpriced name brands and no-name knock-offs that tasted terrible. He was amazed to find an American section at all. How could anyone view Lucky Charms as some sort of exotic specialty? He made a point not to linger near the American shelf, instead squinting at the foreign food labels and formulating half-baked guesses on what ingredients were in the sausages he just bought.
He rode his bike another ten minutes east until he found himself at an English-speaking cafe, the milk jug in his backpack rattling with every cobblestone he rode over. It wasn’t ideal; Jeremy was in Germany and the only thing he could think to do was go somewhere they didn’t speak German. But he needed to prove that he was doing something right. Getting around town was easy; he knew Braunschweig better than his colleagues, but meeting people was harder.
The cafe interior was blanketed by the warmth of afternoon sun which passed through the timber-framed windowpanes. Colorful cakes and pastries decorated the display case and tabletops that people huddled around. In one ear, Jeremy heard the murmur of German, a language that sounded much more like water brushing against stones and branches than it did anger. In the other ear, Jeremy heard the familiar hiss of English. It was in this cafe that he met a local who had recently studied abroad in England before returning to Braunschweig. Her name was Mareike and she knew English as if it was her native tongue. Jeremy hadn’t realized he had been talking with her for hours until the sky had become too dark for him to read the menu anymore. They spoke English, they spoke German, they spoke a hybrid of both—Denglisch they called it. It was easy to get lost in conversation. Mareike made it easy. She told him about a bagel shop that would become his favorite, a mountain trail they would hike every Sunday, a collection of German crime dramas that the two would scrutinize over dinner.
Jeremy spent his nights bent over a textbook trying to memorize the foreign words on the pages until they weren’t foreign anymore. He lived amongst the Germans, talked about the German weather with his colleagues, lived in a German house older than the country he was born in, climbed some German mountains, rode some German bikes until suddenly Jeremy wasn’t a foreigner anymore. He was Jeremy in Germany.
He told me the two main routes to staying in Germany was to either work for a German company or marry a local. Unbeknownst to him at the time, he would end up doing both. He and Mareike would have their first child seven years later, a girl named Ada who Jeremy insists will transport just fine on the back of his bicycle. Once or twice, Jeremy would become Jeremy in America when he booked a flight for Christmas and smuggled the illegal Kinder Egg over the border to delight his cousins. And just like a ghost in the night, he would vanish the next morning on a plane back to that untouchable land. He wasn’t that hard to contact; Jeremy in Germany could be summoned by email with a couple paragraphs of interrogation and artful prying. He was more than willing to write a novella for me in my inbox, his life unraveling like fiction before me. His digital letters were proof that something existed on the other side of that ocean, that it wasn’t merely a figment of television and folklore. Jeremy made the world smaller. He told me that I didn’t have to die in my small town in Wisconsin, that I could grow old under a pear tree in Germany. Jeremy is a benevolent sprite who somehow slipped through the cracks of misery and found peace in a framework house stolen from the pages of a Grimm fairy tale. He is a spectre, the personification of a pipedream I can only see because I see him living it.
