Windows

I love this time of year in Germany. The weather is starting to warm up enough that people are beginning to leave their windows open for much of the day. In my Berlin neighborhood, where many of the houses date back to the earlier part of the century, the houses are all made of stone, with walls a couple of feet thick. Old apartments like ours (built in 1911) have double windows, both open up into the apartment like French doors, and there is about 5 inches between the first and the second window. This means that, although the construction is quite old, it is not as inefficient to heat as one may think. It also means that you hear almost nothing from the outside. But now, the illusion that we are isolated from other people, even though we live in a big city, has been completely debunked. As we leave the apartment and walk through the courtyard, you can hear other people’s conversations, occasional laughter, or even, if we’re lucky, lovers’ quarrels. Sometimes I have to giggle to myself as I walk into the previously-silent Hof, now hearing occasional, enormous farts from where I know a little old lady lives or a guttural belch from little-miss-prim-and-proper’s apartment. I makes me fantasize about meeting these people near the trash bins as we empty our refuse, making polite conversation together, me gently, unobtrusively inserting comments like “So, did you learn to cuss like that in the service?” or “I hope those gastro-intestinal problems have begun to clear up.” Suddenly the once private has been horribly exposed. Surely by the end of the Summer, I will have seen just about everyone in the building naked at one time or another, or at bare minimum in some kind of unflattering light, perhaps the Herr-Doktor-so-and-so picking his nose or some obese woman undulating to an aerobics DVD.

Speaking of the obese, I have been jogging which makes my time outside, within earshot of said events more frequent. I actually find it a bit odd that it has taken the Germans this long to leave their windows open as we have had temperatures in the 70s for some time. Today was 72 degrees Fahrenheit, and I saw a neighbor out on a walk, pushing her newborn in a baby buggy. She seemed surprised that I had been jogging. “In this heat?” she said. This is heat? Wow, I barely broke a sweat and she seemed to think I should be worried about over-exposure. How could such a sensitive race have practically taken over the continent not that long ago? I still find it hard to believe sometimes. They seem so gentile and refined nowadays…so genuinely nice most of the time.