See you later

One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself.

Gertrude Stein, from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

There is the language we use to share information, the language we use to create – ideas, images, imaginings – and the language we hear in our heads. Murmur, mutter, sooth the baby, cry for help, curse in anger. To be alone with one’s language can be the ultimate privacy or the ultimate prison, or it can become, I realized one night watching a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a place to lose ourselves.

It was the first play I saw when I moved to Germany. I went alone. The lights came up on a large elevated, tilted square covered in purple carpet across which hung a metal beaded curtain. The actors entered arguing, and from that point on, I was lost. I watched everything with a vague memory of the plot from the movie, but understood exactly nothing. It was, of course, all in German.

It was an incredibly lonely evening. In a darkened room full of people who understood, I didn’t. It was February 2007, and I had just left behind for the foreseeable future: my husband, my apartment, my books-records-dishes; my friends, family and city; the ability to read my mail or open a bank account, my understanding of state holidays, knowledge of customs and rituals; my language. But how could I resist the temptation to walk out of one life and into another? It was a chance to lose myself. In the process, I thought, maybe I would find something.

Well-spoken German has a hushy, pleasantly raspy sound and I liked not understanding it at first. But that soon began to shift. Laughter took on a disembodied, abstract quality, sounded manufactured. Movements looked like pantomime. I created mental super-titles: “The man lifts his drink to his lips, squints,” “The women clasp waists, one wobbling on her high-heels.” The actors were no longer people but symbols, forms imbued with indecipherable meanings. Architectural ruins, Egyptian pictorial alphabets, computer code. It must mean something, I thought. I’m sure it all means something. I shifted in my seat, my eyes dilated with effort. I forgot where I lived. I forgot what I was doing there. I forgot that I could speak. I tried to come back, repeating in my head over and over: You’re in Germany. You’re in a theater in Germany. You’re a dancer in a theater in Germany and you speak English. But it didn’t help. Intermission came, and I left quickly in relief.

***

Kassel is home to about 150,00 people, if you count the villages. Its claim to fame is the international art exhibition Documenta, which takes place every five years, but most of the time when people come to Kassel it’s to shop. They also come for the theater. Performances play on three stages forty weeks a year. I’ve seen many of them – been packed in with the laughing kids at Christmas shows, tucked into the upper loge for the second act of the opera, sat in the last row for the ancient Greek drama – enough to wonder about the other people in the audience. Where they come from, why they’re there.

Of his characters, the novelist Milan Kundera said, “They are my own unrealized possibilities. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented." We are sitting in our seats you and I, watching the characters lie, kill, writhe, leap, get drunk, get their hands dirty, neglect to say the most important thing. We let them fail, transgress, supersede and are content to watch. There is, in all of us, an urge to get lost in the story. And there is, in many of us – and not just those of us who stand on stages for a living – the urge to take part. We want to cross borders ourselves, to find unrealized possibilities, to lose ourselves over and over.

***

Amanda Knox is a 21 year old American currently on trial accused of murdering her former roommate during a semester abroad. She has been in an Italian jail for 20 months. Last week she was called to testify for the first time. It is a murder trial, a well-publicized and heavily analyzed spectacle that you can read all about on the internet.

Knox comes from Seattle, and when she got to Perugia, she started studying, found an Italian boyfriend and got a job at a bar. On the night of the murder, she was working at the bar. When she was finished working, on her way to hook up with her boyfriend, she sent her boss an SMS message which ended, “Buene notte. Ci vediamo.” Good night, see you later. The bar owner was a suspect in the murder, and when the police found this text message they called Knox in for questioning. With “See you later,” the police’s line of reasoning was, Knox meant she would see her boss later that evening - to follow through with their plan to kill her roommate.

Knox was brought in by the police, questioned for hours, berated and even hit by police officers, she said. “I wasn’t sure what was my imagination and what was reality,” she said of the questioning session. Eventually, she broke down and asked to write down her statement. In what later turned out to be false testimony, she wrote her account of the evening, accusing her boss of killing her roommate. The written declarations, “were taken against my will, and so everything I said was taken under confusion and pressure…In my confusion I started to imagine that maybe I was traumatized, and under pressure I imagined lots of different things because during the days prior the police had suggested many things."

Last week when she testified, Knox spoke in both English and fluent Italian, but at the time of her arrest, her Italian was only passable. She wrote an SMS message in her non-native language, using a common farewell, and this was enough to begin an investigation for murder. Amanda Knox is either guilty or she is not. She testified that she is innocent but there’s a good chance she is not. But I can’t even get far enough in my thinking to form an opinion. I’m still picturing her standing under a street lamp in the warm Perugia night, thumb-typing.

***

Parallel worlds exist simultaneously. Chinese rice paddies are cultivated while Hollywood wives get eyebrow waxes; traffic is jammed during Denver’s evening rush hour while on an island off of Sweden they’re celebrating the solstice; I am swinging high on a ferris wheel above the valley but across an ocean from me in Brooklyn a thousand books and records sit in a dark room to which only I have the key. It is easy to step out in and out of countries, languages, theater lobbies.

What we find is often different from what we seek. We end up far away from where we set out. Some things are recoverable, or like language can be learned; others are lost forever. Stepping out of the brightly lit lobby into the humid, ticking night, it may all look unrecognizably foreign, or uncomfortably and suffocatingly familiar. Or maybe there is no intermission, no chance to leave early. That’s the risk. That the casually tossed “see you later” at the end of the night might not actually mean that. Maybe I will see you later. Maybe I won’t.