The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 27: September 5

Today we had dinner at the German villa in which we are living until December. (Technically, my family and I are not living in the villa; we are living in a small cottage by the gate. We do, however, eat meals at the villa.) This villa was built in the late 1800s and has a WWII-related story I’ve been told secondhand; roughly it involves the Jewish family who once owned the place and the gratitude they felt toward the avenging Americans, who, after the war, used it as a rec house for military personnel and filled it with Ping-Pong tables. When the Americans left, the family, in order to ensure a future of continued German American ideas exchange, donated the villa to an American ambassador who turned it into an academy (minus, sadly, the Ping-Pong tables). This story, or some slightly more accurate version, is how the villa came into my country’s possession; this is how I am being served a fancy dinner in it.

Most everyone living at this villa is an expert on foreign policy, on American and European intellectual history, on international economic issues, and on other topics I know nothing about. For months, my husband and I have worried that we’ll have nothing to say to the experts at the many meals we’re meant to share with them. Here is a good example of why we are worried. Last night my husband and I, in bed, Googled WW1 why did it happen.

At breakfast the other day, I chitchatted with an expert who was trying so hard to relate to me on my turf, such as he understood it; he said how much he appreciated having writers around because they added levity to the usually grave proceedings. But he also had such respect for writers! He brought up the fact that UNESCO had recently awarded Das Kapital a distinction, or maybe it was a prize. I asked if UNESCO only named nonfiction books as winners of this distinction or prize, and he replied, “Oh no, they’ve also named…” and he cited a very long title in German. I admitted that I had never heard of this book. He repeated the title. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know it.” And then he said, “It’s the incredibly famous Middle High German epic on which Wagner based The Ring series.” I said, “Oh, right, right!” The expert seemed a little crestfallen. He could forgive me for failing to be an expert in his area of expertise; he seemed slightly less willing to forgive me for failing to be an expert in my own.

(I have just looked up the UNESCO distinction/prize the expert mentioned. It’s an international program called the “Memory of the World,” the stated goal of which is as follows: “to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climactic conditions, and willful and deliberate destruction.” What the Memory of the World program does not safeguard against is the failure of seemingly very educated and memory-loss-aware people to have read or even heard of these works to begin with. It does not safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against people like me.)

By the night of the first dinner — today’s dinner — my anxiety about socializing with these experts was chart-breaking. I figured the best I could do was make jokes and then more jokes. Or I would — since I’d recently started taking longish swims in the Atlantic Ocean — talk about sharks. I would cite shark attack statistics for the lake we could see through the dining room windows (since before the beginning of time, no shark attacks on humans have been reported in this lake). Fortunately, I was seated near an architect (I could talk buildings) and the fourteen-year-old son of a Chinese foreign policy expert (I could talk Hunger Games). I was also seated near a man in a banker’s suit who was probably younger than me but who felt, categorically speaking, like a no-fun uncle. He introduced himself as the villa’s CFO; we talked grounds, we talked improvements and expensive plumbing disasters. I decided to introduce the topic of the automatic mowers. The villa’s property has a pair of automatic mowers — each is a three-wheeled robot the size and shape of a small ottoman. They are otherworldly to some — my son calls them “the zombie mowers”—and too human to others — my daughter and I have given them names and noted their different personalities. The mower who works the grass patch on the upper grounds we’ve named Schultz; Schultz is lazy and spends a great deal more time in his recharging hut than does the mower we named Greta, who tirelessly works a hilly, and much vaster, grass patch on the lower grounds. She is always mowing, even on weekends. She is dogged and uncomplaining, but my daughter and I have sensed her world-weariness. Greta long ago accepted her lot in life. Schultz, meanwhile, does the absolute minimum to get by.

I brought this up to the CFO; I thought he might want to know, from an insider’s perspective, how certain of his employees were performing.

He said, “Well that’s very interesting,” and proceeded to tell me that in fact Schultz had been performing much better than Greta. And not only that, but Greta and Schultz were in competition with each other; this was their trial period. When the period concluded, only one of them would get the job. (Not one of them. Technically, two mowing companies were in competition for the villa’s mowing contract.) At the moment, it appeared that Schultz had it in the bag. As people say of slam-dunk job candidates, It was his to lose.

This upset me. I couldn’t help but think: How typical. First, how typical that a man (Schultz) does no work at all and is considered the superior candidate, and the woman (Greta) works and works and works yet is still not “good enough” to get the position. Greta’s dedicated hard work even seemed, to this CFO, a strike against her; what a shitty mower she must be if she can’t accomplish the job in half the time, and spend the rest of her day in her recharging hut, sucking down electricity! (I am failing here to interrogate the fact that it was my daughter and I who assigned gendered names to these mowers. I honestly cannot remember if we did it before or after we got to know their different personalities.)

I said to the CFO, “I don’t see how your data is remotely reliable.” I pointed out that the two mowing jobs were hardly comparable; Schultz was responsible for a small, flat, cleanly geometric patch of lawn, while Greta’s patch was three times the size, irregularly shaped, and half overtaken by a steep hill. “If you’re going to compare them, you must switch their spaces. You must make Schultz mow the big and hilly lawn, and give Greta the flat, small one. It’s otherwise not fair.”

I almost said, “It’s practically inhumane!” This villa takes its humanitarian concerns very seriously. Many of the experts invited here have dedicated their lives to improving conditions for humans. To let such a travesty occur just beneath the vast windows of the dining room in which many Nazis had once dined (also directly across the lake from the Wannsee Conference house, in which some famous Nazis met to discuss the “Final Solution”) and where we were currently enjoying chanterelle consommé, well, I didn’t have to rub his nose in the irony.

The CFO looked at me. He said, “You’re right to point that out.”

I felt proud of myself. I honestly thought he might offer to hire me (another job won), or tell me that my true talents were being wasted as a writer — I should be in human resources or business management. Now Greta would have her chance, and she would succeed, or she wouldn’t, but regardless, I hadn’t stood passively by while she was passed over. I had saved her from injustice! Then I realized I’d accomplished no such feat. You’re right to point that out. The CFO’s statement was without content; it held no promise or reassurance or compliment. In fact, it was a total brush-off; possibly even his sentence contained some hidden irritation. What do you, a writer, know about groundskeeping budgets? His statement was the discomforting equivalent of what certain people say after I give a reading at a library or a bookstore or wherever. They are politic. They are careful to deliver messages so hollow that they beg to be filled with unstated criticisms. These people do not say, I love your work, or That was so great. These people say, How wonderful it was to hear you read.