Travel Tales: Berlin to Madrid

I hardly ever have conversations on airplanes anymore - usually, I suppose, because I'm too busy practicing self-defense moves on my slithering, screaming, gyrating toddler or because anyone apart from insane desperately lonely passengers are carefuly to provide me a very wide berth.

The flight from Berlin to Madrid was different, however.

First, there was the remarkable conjuring of Alejandro the Spaniard.

Alejandro was my roommate for 3 months in an East German dormitory in Berlin in 1988. I hadn't seen him since then. He's been an occasional topic of anecdotes, however, famous among those who know me for both his extraordinary beauty and his atrocious German language skills. That combination of factors led to gorgeous East German women visiting our dorm room on a regular basis to talk to Alejandro, with me serving as interpreter. I can still taste the humiliation of it. What made it worse was that Alejandro was so fantastically sweet and innocent.

The other day was my first ever trip to Spain, and I thought of Alejandro as the plane was about to take off. I knew he was from Madrid, and I was thinking it was a shame that I couldn't remember his last name and wouldn't be able to look him up there.

Later in the flight, I took Eve for a walk and was about halfway down the plane when a smiling polite young man in a blazer got up and asked me something more or less garbled and incomprehensible in German with a strong Spanish accent. Are you asking if I'm from Berlin, I said. I live there. No, no, he said, more slowly and clearly, I'm asking if you were in Berlin in 1988.

I looked at him more closely. Alejandro! It was really him. He had barely changed. The same Dudley Dooright jaw, wavy hair like the guys in the old "wet head is dead commercials," broad shoulders, sparkling blue eyes. Unreal.

And he was living in Berlin, working for Deutsche Welle, had married a German woman and had a three year old daughter. Actually, his German had gotten quite idiomatic and clear, though his pronounciation had barely changed. So we had a wonderful conversation, much richer than anything we could have had 15 years ago, though I had to ask him to repeat everything twice.

Eventually I headed back to my seat. And I must have been feeling optimistic about the potential for airline communication, since I quickly struck up a conversation with the Korean woman sitting next to me. (And Eve must have been optimistic too, because she was extremely well behaved.)

This woman spoke perfect German, so I asked if she was German, and she laughed, as if it was a crazy question. She came from Korea 30 years ago to work as a nurse, had two children (presumably marrried, but it wasn't clear) and raised them in the quiet residential neighborhood of Zehlendorf. Now her kids were grown. One lived in Madrid. She has moved to a tiny Bavarian village, and she loves it.

So she likes living in Germany? Yes. Always treated well? Yes.

Then we talked about other stuff, and at some point she asked me whether I would ever consider staying in Berlin. I said that I loved Berlin, but I didn't think I could raise children there. As Jews, we would never feel completely at home. More often than not, my children would be seen as either a) exotic specimens, ghosts of a great tribe that had otherwise disappeared, or b) aliens and potential objects of hostility.

Yes, yes, she said. I know what mean. Germans don't know how to accept other cultures. There is no space for other cultures here.

I was stunned at her quick change of perspective. And then she suddenly launched into a story about her eldest child.