tangentially involved in the city’s Cold War complexities, I also sent my résumé and a copy of my Egyptian tome to Radio Liberty in Washington. They were the US-government-funded broadcasting network that beamed in news and the American worldview to all countries behind the Iron Curtain. Along with my book, I attached a résumé and a cover letter explaining that I was planning to spend a year in Berlin and might there be some sort of opening for a writer in their offices there.
I didn’t expect to hear back from them, filing the whole thing away under “long shot.” I also figured they were probably the sort of organization that only hired rabid anti-Communists who were also bilingual. But a letter did arrive from Washington one afternoon. It was from a gentleman named Huntley Cranley, the director of programming, who informed me that he found my book and my résumé most interesting, and he was dispatching them on to Jerome Wellmann, the head of Radio Liberty in Berlin. Once there I should inform him that I was in town. After that, it was all down to the discretion of Mr. Wellmann whether he granted me an audience or not.
A week later—my apartment sublet again, my one suitcase packed, a heavy army greatcoat on my back—I folded this letter into a German-English dictionary, which I then threw into my shoulder bag. After turning off the lights and double locking the door, I took the bus out to Kennedy Airport on a grim January evening when sleet simply wouldn’t transform itself to snow. There, I checked in my bag, accepted a boarding pass, passed through the usual array of detectors and security, squeezed myself into my assigned seat, watched the skyline of Manhattan recede into nocturnal midwinter gloom, and quietly drank myself to sleep as the plane achieved cruising altitude and journeyed east.
When I awoke many hours later, my head was still thick and gloomy after far too many miniatures of Scotch. I peered out the window and saw nothing but the gray density of cloud.
That’s the thing about finding yourself in the clouds, I remember thinking at the time. You are in somewhere which looks like nowhere. You are flying through a blank page . . . and you have no idea what’s to be written on it .
Then the cloud turned to mist, the mist burned away, and down below there was . . .
Land. Fields. Buildings. The outline of a city on the curved edge of the horizon. And all refracted through the numbness of a night spent sleeping sitting up in a cramped seat. We had another ten minutes or so before touchdown. Reaching into my jacket pocket, I pulled out the bag of tobacco and rolling papers that had been my constant companion since my final year at college—and which had, without question, helped me negotiate all the nervy moments at my desk over the past year. Put simply, I had become a serious smoker during the course of writing my first book and needed at least fifteen cigarettes to carry myself through most days. And now—even though the “No Smoking” sign had been switched on—I was already pulling out my smoking paraphernalia and quickly fashioning a cigarette, which could be lit up as soon as I was inside the terminal building.
Land. Fields. Buildings. Specifically: the high-rise outline of Frankfurt, that most mercantile and aesthetically flat of German cities. I had studied German since my freshman year at college. It had always been a complex relationship: a love of the language’s density of form and structural rigor coupled with the desperate grind of the dative case and the longueurs that accompany trying to drill a language into your head, especially when you are living largely outside said language. I had toyed with the idea of spending an entire year studying in Germany—but instead chose to spend my junior year editing the college newspaper. How could I have thought that being editor in chief of a student newspaper was in some way more important than having a year playing the student prince at
I didn’t expect to hear back from them, filing the whole thing away under “long shot.” I also figured they were probably the sort of organization that only hired rabid anti-Communists who were also bilingual. But a letter did arrive from Washington one afternoon. It was from a gentleman named Huntley Cranley, the director of programming, who informed me that he found my book and my résumé most interesting, and he was dispatching them on to Jerome Wellmann, the head of Radio Liberty in Berlin. Once there I should inform him that I was in town. After that, it was all down to the discretion of Mr. Wellmann whether he granted me an audience or not.
A week later—my apartment sublet again, my one suitcase packed, a heavy army greatcoat on my back—I folded this letter into a German-English dictionary, which I then threw into my shoulder bag. After turning off the lights and double locking the door, I took the bus out to Kennedy Airport on a grim January evening when sleet simply wouldn’t transform itself to snow. There, I checked in my bag, accepted a boarding pass, passed through the usual array of detectors and security, squeezed myself into my assigned seat, watched the skyline of Manhattan recede into nocturnal midwinter gloom, and quietly drank myself to sleep as the plane achieved cruising altitude and journeyed east.
When I awoke many hours later, my head was still thick and gloomy after far too many miniatures of Scotch. I peered out the window and saw nothing but the gray density of cloud.
That’s the thing about finding yourself in the clouds, I remember thinking at the time. You are in somewhere which looks like nowhere. You are flying through a blank page . . . and you have no idea what’s to be written on it .
Then the cloud turned to mist, the mist burned away, and down below there was . . .
Land. Fields. Buildings. The outline of a city on the curved edge of the horizon. And all refracted through the numbness of a night spent sleeping sitting up in a cramped seat. We had another ten minutes or so before touchdown. Reaching into my jacket pocket, I pulled out the bag of tobacco and rolling papers that had been my constant companion since my final year at college—and which had, without question, helped me negotiate all the nervy moments at my desk over the past year. Put simply, I had become a serious smoker during the course of writing my first book and needed at least fifteen cigarettes to carry myself through most days. And now—even though the “No Smoking” sign had been switched on—I was already pulling out my smoking paraphernalia and quickly fashioning a cigarette, which could be lit up as soon as I was inside the terminal building.
Land. Fields. Buildings. Specifically: the high-rise outline of Frankfurt, that most mercantile and aesthetically flat of German cities. I had studied German since my freshman year at college. It had always been a complex relationship: a love of the language’s density of form and structural rigor coupled with the desperate grind of the dative case and the longueurs that accompany trying to drill a language into your head, especially when you are living largely outside said language. I had toyed with the idea of spending an entire year studying in Germany—but instead chose to spend my junior year editing the college newspaper. How could I have thought that being editor in chief of a student newspaper was in some way more important than having a year playing the student prince at
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