The
Wall had been down for three years when I first talked to somebody from the
former GDR, not in
Germany but in the community room of a hostel in Truckee,
where I was waiting for a phone call from the police. My rental car had been
stolen – and with it, my money, passport, airline ticket, and clothes. “The
door wasn’t locked,” I’d said to the officer in the morning, “but I was back
after two minutes. There’s practically nobody out there. The fucking place is
empty. I am the only guest.”
And now I
was sitting on a rundown sofa in front of the hostel’s fireplace to catch some
warmth in my T-shirt – I’d taken it for granted that California would be warm
and sunny and not as cold and gray as my hometown – when a guy came in. He was
tanned and had shoulder-long, sun-bleached hair, like the surfers I’d seen in
L.A., but was dressed appropriately (sweater, coat) apart from his feet which
looked tiny and vulnerable in fake Birkenstocks. “How you doing?” he said with
the most horrible German accent. That’s when I knew for sure; they hadn’t
learned English at school, only Russian.
“Fine,” I
answered in English. I was still hoping to be gone shortly. The last thing I
wanted was a chat in my mother tongue with a compatriot, not to mention a fake
one.
He looked
me up and down, then he said, “First time in America?”
“No,” I
lied, reaching for one of the books on the coffee table, which turned out to be
by Hermann Hesse.
“Steppenwolf,”
the guy said. “Big thing in my home country.” He extended his hand, smiled, and
said, “Michael.”
“Rainer.”
“Guten Tag,
Rainer,” he said.
A little
later I heard him shuffle behind me, then he laughed and said in German, “Seems
that we can’t escape each other.”
I turned
around. He was standing behind the
makeshift reception counter in the corner. I just wanted to say something when
the guy who registered me the day before came in through the back door. “Hey,
Michael, did you enjoy it?”
“Ja,” he said, holding his hands wide
apart. “Catch fish big wie
Delfin.” (If he didn’t know – or didn’t like – a word in English, he just
switched to German.) He turned back to me. “Are you hungry? Tonight, we’ll have
a feast!”
“It’s
okay,” the other guy said. “You can pay when you get your stuff back.”
“He can
help out,” Michael said. “Earn bed and food, all right?” He looked at the other
guy who shrugged and retreated to the back. “What about wood?” Michael called
after him in English. “Is it genug?”
“Could use
some extra hands.”
“Morgen. Today is… “ He paused and looked at me, then he said, “Celebration.” He
smiled and switched back to German. “Don’t worry. I won’t let down a
compatriot.”
I grew up
right next to the former border. When in November 1989 all these pale,
pathetically clothed people with their stupid haircuts and wounded eyes invaded
our town all of a sudden, my friends and I were shocked. The older generations
may have cheered; we looked at them with a mixture of disgust and pity. “Let’s check
it out,” my then-girlfriend said the
following spring, but I didn’t want to mess up my new car on the bad roads over there.
“What kind
of car was it again, Rainer?”
The way he
pronounced my name made me regret that I ever told him. “A red Honda. Nothing
special. You don’t get far with a rented car anyway.”
“Well,”
Michael said, “depends what you’re planning to do with it. Don’t get your hopes
too high, Rainer.”
“Maybe I
should take a bus to San Francisco and go straight to the embassy.” I smiled
and said, “Could you lend me some money for the ticket and maybe a coffee?
There’s nothing I can leave as a deposit
though. You’d have to trust me.”
“Im Westen nichts Neues,“ he said.
I didn’t get it. I hadn’t seen the movie. Nor had I read the
book.
Michael laughed.
“Listen, Rainer, I wouldn’t do that. If the police stop you, they’ll lock you
up. I heard of foreigners who rotted in jail for years.” He slapped me on the
back. “As I said, I won’t let down a compatriot. You can help James with the
wood. He’s having problems with his back lately. Aren’t you cold, Rainer?”
“No,” I
said, stepping back so that he wouldn’t notice the goose-bumps covering my
naked arms.
While
Michael was cooking I sat on the sofa,
holding the book, pretending to read. Despite the fire I was freezing. Finally he
stuck his head through the door and said, “Let’s eat.”
It was only
the two of us; the other guy hadn’t returned. “Smells fantastic,” I said as I
sat down.
“My father
often took me fishing on the weekends, to Rügen, ever been?” He piled up
potatoes on my plate. “Did you visit the East at all, Rainer?”
I took a
sip from the American beer, which was weak compared to the one in Germany but
at least not the horrible GDR swill a friend of mine once brought to a party as
a joke. “I was too busy studying.”
“Pity,” he
said.
I nodded
even though it was the last place I’d wanted to go. The photographs in our
history books had given me the creeps: old men in gray suits, housewives
queuing in front of empty shop windows, treeless ghost towns, and parades with
lines and lines of soldiers marching in lockstep.
“We always
came back with an overfilled trunk.” Michael carefully balanced a huge trout on
the potato hill. “Our whole neighborhood lived from it for weeks.” He sat down
and reached for knife and fork. “We had plenty to eat in the GDR.”
I picked
into a potato. My appetite had suddenly gone. “Thank you for cooking,” I said.
“You gotta
finish your plate if you don’t want any rain tomorrow.” Michael got up, turned
the radio on, switched stations, and eventually sang along to Let’s get together and feel alright in
his horrible accent. When the next song began, he turned the radio off. “My old
man was in the same hospital in capitalist Germany for treatment,” he said. “He
lay in the lounger on that terrace overlooking the lake, what was it called
again?”
I shrugged.
“Anyway, he
was there, right next to Bob Marley, and had no idea who that guy was.”
“They let
him out? I thought that you guys couldn’t leave.”
“They let
him out and back in again when he was cured. My old man used to say the devil
was sitting in between them and they had to draw lots. When it fell on him, Bob
swapped loungers, that’s what my old man says. Never knew his music but liked
him anyway. Said that they were both fighting for the right cause. My old man
wanted to flee after the operation, but how could he with that guy believing in
him?”
“I was
never much of a reggae fan,” I said.
“Coffee?”
Michael said.
“If it’s
not the stuff you had in the GDR?”
“You’re
right. It was awful,” he said. “Once or twice a year my mother’s uncle from Hannover
came by. Sat in the middle of the sofa, placed his fake leather suitcase on the
table, and took out one parcel after the
other, wrapped in layers of old TV-papers. West
TV, of course. Our kitchen smelled of cakes or bread coming fresh from the
oven, but we had to cheer at cheap store-bought stuff.” He leaned back and was silent as if trying to get back to those
moments. “But the coffee,” he said after a while, “well, I guess it was the coffee
that made my parents play along.” He passed me the pot which was cold by now,
and so was the coffee. “What about you? Did you send care packages too?”
“My
grandmother did for Christmas,” I said.
“Good
girl!” Michael opened a drawer, took out a pack of cigarettes, Karo, the most popular brand in the
former GDR, and sat down again. He offered me one, I shook my head. “I am not
much of a smoker.”
“Take it,”
he said, holding the lighter up.
I took one
out, put it into my mouth, and leaned forward to reach the flame.
Michael
grinned. “Say thank you, Rainer.”
My mother
was born in Thuringia shortly after WWII broke out. How her parents came to
live in the West had never been a topic and
neither had my grandmother’s brother, who remained in the East. Even the
preparing and the sending of packages were
only discussed between my mother and my grandmother. Once I came into the
kitchen while they were filling a huge cardboard box with presents for cousins
I only knew from blurry photographs. When there was no new camera waiting for
me under our Christmas tree a few weeks later, just a used one, I blamed them.
Michael
shoved the cigarettes back to me as soon as I’d finished smoking. “Take another
one.”
“They are a
bit too strong for me.”
He smiled
and said, “The cancer rate was twice as high in the former East, did you know?”
I smiled
back. “Your cars weren’t helping, I guess.”
People in
my hometown would throw coins and food from their windows as the endless line
of tiny cardboard vehicles were slowly passing along every street, turning our
clear blue sky into a smog dome. When we were drunk one night, we passed a snot-green Trabi covered with bananas and money. We checked that nobody was
watching and each of us grabbed two marks for a beer.
Michael
pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and passed it to me. “Take it, Rainer.”
I tried to
inhale as little as possible, hoping he wouldn’t realize, and held the cigarette in my hand until there was only the
filter left. I cleared my throat and said, “I’ll talk to my parents first thing in the morning. They’ll
wire some money.”
“Did I tell you that the rooms are being
renovated? But don’t worry, I’ve got a cot upstairs. I’ll bring it down for
you.” Michael opened the cabinet and produced a bottle of green liquid. “First
a toast.” He filled two glasses to the brim, passed me one, and held up his. “A
toast to the homeland.” And, closing his eyes, he began to sing his old
national anthem: From the ruins risen
newly, To the future turned, we stand. Let us serve your good weal truly, Germany, our fatherland.
I stood
there, motionless, the empty glass in one hand, the cigarette bud in the other,
and I realized that it was only us now and that it would be no-one apart from
us any time soon.
Michael
slowly opened his eyes and smiled, “Sorry, I forgot.” He turned around and opened the drawer to
take out a sharpie, with which he wrote the lyrics on the fridge. “Rainer, do
you know the melody?”
I shook my
head.
“It’s okay.
I’ll teach you.”
We drank a
glass of the sweet peppermint liquor after each verse and eventually replaced
the empty bottle with a red one. It was long past midnight when he finally brought down the cot, and yet he woke me up when it was still pitch dark
outside.
“Rainer,”
he said, blinding me with a torch, “we need wood.”
I was
naked. My body was so stiff from the cold that I could hardly move. “Where are
my clothes?”
“In the
washing machine. God, you made a mess.” He pointed at a pile of clothes on the
sofa. “They should fit.”
I got up
and wrapped the thin sheet around me like a toga. “I’d like to have a shower.”
“Later, Rainer,
go get us some wood first, will you? It’s fucking cold in here.”
I waited
for him to leave but he didn’t move, so I
let go of the sheet and quickly slipped into the shabby underwear and socks
he’d offered me. I put on a pair of jeans, the kind we laughed at in ‘89, and pulled a pullover over my head, which
left my hair static for at least a minute. As I reached for my cowboy boots he
said, “Let’s swap.”
I bought them
in San Francisco. On the day of my arrival. First thing on my list. It was
something I had been dreaming of for a long time, the trip to the US and the
boots, and since I’d walked out of that small, dark shop filled to the brim
with boots in all imaginable and unimaginable shapes, patterns, and colors,
with that unforgettable odor of good, thick leather that could make you high, I
hadn’t been out of them. “Come on,” I said, “your feet are much smaller than
mine.”
He grabbed
an old TV magazine, tore a page out, balled it up, and said, “When you guys
sent us your old sneakers, they never came in the right size. But necessity is
the mother of invention.”
Not only
were his feet smaller than mine, I also was
nearly a head taller and my shoulders
were much wider. I could easily beat him
up, I thought, and yet, I passed him my boots, watched as he filled them with
newspaper clippings, and slipped into his fake Birkenstocks even though my toes
and heels went over the edge. “Where’s the wood?”
“Hold on. I
don’t want you to freeze to death, Rainer.” He handed me an oversized fake leather
jacket with huge patches that looked as if cut from an Indian rug; all men from
the GDR, no matter what age, seemed to be wearing them when they invaded the
West. “Take this,” he said.
“I’m fine,”
I said.
He smiled.
“If you say so.”
I followed
him to the back door and out of the house. It was raining heavily. I was
soaking wet when we arrived at a shed. He loosened the latch, opened the door,
and said, “I totally forgot. There’s none left. Would you mind chopping some?”
He stepped inside, took a hatchet from a hook at the wall, and pressed it into
my hands. “You know how to do it, right?”
I didn’t, but nonetheless
I said, “Where do you have your supplies?”
“There.” He
turned around and pointed at the forest down the hill. “Take as much as you
want.”
“It’s
raining!”
“See, Rainer?
You didn’t finish your plate.” He patted my shoulder and said, “Sure about the
jacket?”
The trees
were too big and too wet. After an hour or so I gave up and returned to the
house. A huge fire was burning, a stack
of logs was piled up against the wall. “Luckily, a neighbor helped out,”
Michael said. “He lives down the road. Good guy. Very interested in our
country. Took the first flight to Berlin when the Wall came down, fancy that!
He was crying, he told me, walking through the Brandenburg Gate and along Unter
den Linden, he couldn’t stop crying.”
I remembered my English teacher mentioning
something like that one Monday morning, and me thinking, Sentimental old fuck.
Michael put
a mug of coffee on the table. “Careful, Rainer,
it’s hot.”
“Can I use
your phone?”
“Sure. But
sit down first. Get some rest.” He gently pushed me onto the chair, saying,
“God, you’re wet.”
“I’m okay,”
I said.
He grabbed
the horrible jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. “I don’t want you to catch
a cold, Rainer.”
I reached
for the mug, burnt my already callused and blistered hands, and let it drop
onto the table, spilling half of the coffee.
Michael
sighed. “Didn’t I warn you?”
I stood up.
“Please let me call my parents.”
“Go ahead.”
I reached
behind the counter to pick up the phone, quickly punched in the number, got
lost twice, made it really slow the third time. There was no tone. I put down
the receiver, picked it up again. Still no tone.
“It’s dead.”
“Happens
sometimes. Probably the rain.” Michael smiled. “We didn’t have a phone, Rainer.
Most of us didn’t. We paid a visit when we wanted to talk to somebody.”
I only now
noticed that the stairway to the upper floor with the only bathroom was
blocked. In the morning I’d urinated sheltered by trees, but I would have to go
soon again, and not for a pee only.
I walked to
the fireplace and sat down next to it to give my clothes a chance to get dry.
He patted
me on the shoulder. “Time for a schnapps, I’d say.”
“You’re
really enjoying this, aren’t you?”
He laughed.
“It gets lonely sometimes. The price of freedom. Can’t have the cake and eat it
too.” He got up, returned with the green bottle and two glasses, and his strong
cigarettes. “This place can be busy in
summer, but the rest of the year not many people show up.”
“Any other Germans?”
“A few.”
He offered
me a cigarette, I accepted. After the third
I couldn’t hold back anymore. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
“Well, Rainer,
it’s also under construction.” He started to laugh. “Back home, I sublet my
place while I am here. When I showed the guy around, when he realized that the
toilet is outside the apartment, he looked at me like you are looking at me
now.”
He stopped,
most probably waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t, so he went on,
“It’s not the end of the world, Rainer. He doesn’t even have to share it,
nobody else has access. It’s just the fact that you have to come out of your
cave to take a piss.” He grinned. “Or the other one.”
I still had
nothing to say. Surely, there was a second bathroom. But by now I’d learned
that it was wiser to keep my mouth shut in moments like those.
“Just make
a few steps away from the house so that it doesn’t start to reek like a public
pissoir here,” he said.
I cleared
my throat and said, “Can I have some toilet paper? Or these wipes from the
kitchen?”
“We ran out
of both, sorry.” Michael passed me the TV magazine. “Back to the roots.”
In San
Francisco, a man had been distributing
large posters. There was a red square on it, surrounded by a white frame. In
the middle, the words: I don’t remember.
I asked him what he meant by it and he
said, “It’s what most Germans answered when I interviewed them about the Fall
of the Wall.”
I laughed.
“That’s why I’m here. To get away from all that shit.”
He was an
artist from NYC. He had German ancestors but didn’t speak the language. “East
or West?” he asked.
“You
shouldn’t do that,” I said. “It’s humiliating.”
“Why?”
“Because…”
I began, but then I just said, “From the West.”
Michael was
still sitting in front of the fireplace
when I came back. I sank down next to him and held my wet feet into the warmth.
He turned his head and said, “Take another cigarette.”
“Thank
you,” I said, and this time I meant it.
We sat in
silence for a while, smoking and drinking. Then I said, “I really need to go to
the embassy. Can you take me to San Francisco? I’ll pay you five hundred
dollars.”
“Rainer.”
“A thousand.”
He sighed
and said, “You really think you can buy me again with a hundred deutschmarks?”
That’s what
they got as a welcome present. There were endless lines in front of every bank.
They were not only distributing money but
pens, sweets, toys, and all kinds of giveaways. I didn’t have the feeling that
they really controlled passports, there was no time with more than 16 million
people wanting their money ASAP.
“We could
say that we lost our IDs,” my friend once said, as we were observing them,
those other Germans, who even months later seemed to have come from another
planet.
I laughed
out loud. I looked at his brand new Levi’s, the Fred Perry jacket we both had –
his black, mine blue – and his Doc Martens he’d taken great pains to clean in
the morning. “They’d never notice,” I said, still laughing.
With a wide grin,
Michael added, “Or with bananas.”
The rain
still hadn’t stopped. Even with that ugly jacket,
I’d be soaking wet if I walked to the police station again. “You can keep my
boots,” I said.
He put two
cigarettes into his mouth, lit them, and carefully placed one between my lips.
My best friend used to do it. We started smoking at the age of thirteen. I quit
a couple of years later when I changed schools but never forgot the tenderness
of that gesture, especially after I’d read somewhere that the first drag is the
most harmful.
“The problem
with you guys,” Michael said, “has always been that you think money gets you
everywhere. You want to get rich to have
a fancy car, a bigger house, a younger woman. If you’re unhappy, it’s because
of money. But what if for once money doesn’t help? What if nobody cares how
much money you have?”
I jumped up
and flipped the cigarette into the fire. “Weren’t you happy? Weren’t you
fucking happy to be free? To go wherever you wanted for the first time? To say
whatever you wanted? To meet whom you wanted? To trust people because there was
no Stasi anymore? To finally have shops
with overfilling shelves? To buy all these things yourself instead of waiting
for packages once a year?”
Michael got
up, refilled the fire place, and waited until the flames returned again, higher
and mightier than ever before. “Rainer,” he said. “You still don’t get it.”
That year,
I was soon fed up with the documentaries about people walking through
supermarkets crying, about their complaining how hard it had been for them to
know what we all had, these masses of strangers, whom we were supposed to call
brothers and sisters, who were nothing but ordinary refugees to me, to most of
the people I knew.
Fortunately,
I’d just graduated and could go away from that chaos. I was living in France
when I heard about the reunification in the news. I listened to it with the
same disinterest I would have shown for a famine in some unpronounceable
African country.
“What if we
hadn’t let you in?” I said. “You all would have had to turn around and go back
home. You’d have been shot or put into prison for the rest of your lives. Don’t
you remember what happened in Prague?”
Michael
looked at me in silence. “Rainer,” he finally said, holding up his glass,
“would you mind cleaning up?”
I carried
our glasses to the kitchen. The pile had grown overnight,
as if the whole neighborhood had been dumping their dishes into our sink. I
rolled up my sleeves and turned the water on. Then I turned it off again and
opened the door to the community room.
“Yes, Rainer?”
“You guys
left your kids in the apartment. You didn’t care if they died in their own
shit. The whole lot of you sold your souls to go
shopping. Freedom of speech? Freedom to
study what you wanted? Freedom to travel? My ass!”
It was
dinner time when I was done but I
wouldn’t ask for anything to eat. The cot had vanished so I lay down on the sofa and covered myself with the ugly jacket.
Despite the cold – the fire had long burnt down – I fell asleep at once. But Michael woke me up, “You must be hungry, Rainer,”
he said, and since I was, I sat up again
and accepted the plate with potatoes, sauerkraut, and a very dark indefinable
mash. I greedily shoved it into my mouth.
Michael
watched me with a big smile. “Good?”
I nodded.
“My all-time-favorite,”
he said. “We had it at least once a week.”
“What is
it?”
“Dead
grandma.”
I stopped
chewing.
“Just blood
sausage,” Michael said laughing. “That’s how we call it. Tote Oma.” He nodded toward the window behind which the rain was
pouring down as strong as before. “Eat up this time.”
I finished
my plate and carried it to the kitchen to rinse it. Sinking back onto the sofa
I said, “Why are you keeping me here?”
Michael
stood up, walked to the front door, and opened it. “It was never locked.”
I leaned
back and closed my eyes. I needed to sleep. If I didn’t answer, he would leave me alone, I hoped. And really, I
heard him walking out of the room after a while.
But he soon returned, carrying a metal box. “I want to show you something, Rainer.”
He sat down
next to me, opened the box, and took out a photograph of a young woman leaning
against a tree. “This is Ingrid,” he said. “Great tits. Sat behind me in class.
She always wanted to become an actress. Went to Berlin at the age of fifteen,
an aunt of hers was living there. Every night she was standing in front of
Berliner Ensemble until they hired her for all kinds of odd jobs. As she was
cleaning the stage, Tenschert watched
her. You wouldn’t have heard of him, of course. He was a famous director in the
GDR.” He smiled and passed me the photograph. “A week later she performed in
Brecht’s Mother.”
I looked at
the girl in the tight black dress, who’d obviously
wanted to copy Kim Wilde.
“Langhoff
fired her. He brought his people over from the West.” Michael gave me another
photograph of three guys dressed in black, leather jackets, hair punk style. He
pointed at the tall guy in the middle. “This is Alex, biggest Who fan ever.
Somebody smuggled their songbook over which he translated with the help of a
dictionary that only had half of the pages left. Most of the songs were totally
unknown to him, but they played them anyway, in German.” He laughed. “We were
disappointed when we heard the original for the first time.”
The next
photograph showed two men wearing old-fashioned
suits and a woman in an evening dress. One of the men reminded me of Jean-Paul
Belmondo in his early, serious films, the black-and-white ones. The other man
had his arm around the woman’s shoulder and was leaning into her as if he wanted to smell her perfume, eyes
closed, smiling.
“Tina.
She’s a poet,” Michael said. “And her husband, Marco, translator and literary
theorist. He used to write the epilog to French classics for Rütten und Löning. You don’t know them,
right? It was a prestigious publisher, gone of course.” He pointed at young
Belmondo’s doppelganger. “Franz, activist, performance artist, musician,
painter, and my best friend.”
He gave me
another photograph, of a family this time, the child maybe two years old.
Father and mother were around my age, and they were all lying in bed, John
Lennon & Yoko Ono style, their heads bent over a huge picture-book. “My
brother, my sister-in-law, and the cutest nephew you can imagine. She’s a doctor,
he’s an electrician, and baby Kevin is in sixth
grade now. He likes airplanes and Nirvana.”
Another
photograph, of a woman in her forties, wearing a work coat, hammering away on
some piece of stone. “My aunt Tatiana.
She was trained by Inge Hunzinger. You wouldn’t have heard of her either. She’s
a famous sculptor.”
I felt like
back in school and decided that the wisest thing to do was to keep my mouth
shut and listen.
Michael put
the next one on the pile, saying, “Her boyfriend Richy, he works at a morgue.
Tatiana’s favorite workplace. She helps them to resurrect, she says.”
This
went on and on, until the box was empty. Then he
left the room and came back with the cot and a sleeping bag. “You see us and there’s only one story in your head:
totalitarian state, shortage, uniformity, subordinate
mentality. We’re all the same to you, aren’t we? One look at us and you feel
that you know everything.”
He unfolded
the cot, opened the zip of the sleeping bag, pressed a pillow into a freshly
washed case (I could smell the softener), and said, “Yes, you opened your
borders. But you expected us to be ever so thankful, to condemn our fatherland.
We had to denounce our past. Happiness, love, music, even sex wasn’t something
you imagined us having. A life of misery,
but thank God it was over on November 9th, 1989, when the Good
People from the West saved us.”
The next
morning, I was woken up by quiet footsteps, definitely
not Michael’s, unless he’d gotten out of my boots. It was the guy who’d checked
me in. He told me that there was coffee in the kitchen and fresh bagels too. I
got up, went outside to pee, and only when I was walking toward the house
again, fully realized that it had stopped raining.
A little
later I sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, gazing out the window when I
saw the red Honda. At two o’clock in the afternoon I reached the airport, in
the evening I boarded a plane to Frankfurt. Next to me sat a seventy-six-year-old woman from Chicago, born
in Weimar, and married to a translator from Minneapolis, who had taken her to
the States after the Nuremberg trials. She showed me a black-and-white
photograph of two young women, both faces beaming with beauty and hope. “That’s
my cousin,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since I left Germany. We went to a
nightclub in Berlin, it was somewhere on Pariser Strasse, do you know it?”
“I’ve never
been to Berlin.”
“Oh, yes,”
she said. “You weren’t allowed of course.”
I didn’t
correct her, and neither did I tell her that we’d been calling it Prison
Berlin.
She put the
photograph back into her purse. She couldn’t believe it when she was watching
the news that night, she said. She would always
remember Peter Jennings, in his khaki trench coat, standing in front of all
these beautiful, colorful, courageous people, who were climbing or jumping down
the wall. How small it suddenly looked, how harmless, like a toy. It took her
two years to find her cousin, but here
she was now, on her way to be reunified with her.
“That’s
nice,” I said.
She smiled,
wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse, then she touched my underarm and
said, “I am so happy for you guys.”
