My friends among them were a Dutch widow named Frau van Tiedemann, a Portuguese trader named Herr Camera who imported oranges from the Canaries to Berlin, and old Herr Döppke. The crowd that gathered around the table at dinnertime was a rather motley one. The other guests at the pension also relished the opportunity to be friends with a Turk, and the silly questions they asked often made my head ache. The madame who owned the pension also was fond of having a chat in her spare time, and she became a great help to me. He had spent some time in Turkey and learned some Turkish. Having come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t get anything moving here without the language, I started taking private lessons from an officer who had served in the World War. For my part, I was still unaware what kind of a thing the Europe of my dreams had been, and how much the city I was now living in lacked, in comparison to that image… It had not yet dawned on me how the mind can produce the most stupendous projections of all. But there was nothing about it that would make a person swoon with awe. A city with wider streets-much cleaner, and with blonder people. The wonder of these first few days didn’t last long. I spent the first weeks trying to learn the language at a survival level, wandering the city and admiring it.
Thanks to the five or ten words I learned out of a conversation book during my four-day train ride, I was able to make it to a pension, a word I had jotted down in my notebook back in Istanbul. Within the week I was ready to go, and I set off through Bulgaria on a train to Berlin.
Wasn’t my own savageness, my disaffection toward my surroundings, merely the result of having been unable to find these people I had met and loved in books? In this “Europe”, I expected I would learn a foreign language and read books in that language, but especially that I would finally encounter the people I had so far only known in novels. Andrea del Sarto, “Madonna delle Arpie” (Madonna of the Harpies, 1517)
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