New York for Beginners (22 page)

Zoe killed time until her job interview by taking walks. Since she’d been back in Germany, the sun hadn’t come out even once. Zoe hadn’t seen a single strip of blue sky—that had been practically an everyday occurrence in New York. All around Herpersdorf, fog was lying over the fields in milky, dense, heavy swathes. She followed the path along the horse pastures, which were lonely and empty in the winter, and tried to find the place in the woods where she and Steffi had built a tree house when they were children, and the World War II bunker they’d discovered but never dared enter. If she was being honest, she was trying to find herself.

It didn’t exactly help that her mother, who was waiting for her at home—Zoe knew it—was secretly glad that the Yankees had driven her daughter back home. Karin Schuhmacher had a serious problem with Americans. She didn’t trust a nation that had “elected a B-class actor as their president,” “established their status as a world power through an arms race,” and “brought the epidemic of obesity over to us with their fast food.” Those were all direct quotes from Karin Schuhmacher. Zoe didn’t think her mother had ever even seen a movie with Ronald Reagan in it.

If Zoe had stayed in America, her mother would never have come to visit. Before Zoe moved to the dreaded country, her mother explained that she would never travel there, on principle. It was easier to be prejudiced from a distance.

“Please have a seat, Zoe. How are you doing?” the editor-in-chief of the Ansbach newspaper asked. He had basically known her since she’d been born. For the past hundred years now, her parents had gone bowling with him and his wife every Friday. Zoe’s mother had set up the interview with Mr. Gottfried for her. She was under the impression that Zoe’s life needed to be put back on track—at home. And what could be more on track—and closer to home—than a leading position at the local newspaper?

“The position of Department Head for the weekend supplement has just been vacated,” Gottfried said. “Would you be interested?”

“I can imagine myself doing that,” Zoe answered.

So now Zoe would write about the rock and pop bands at the Taubertal open-air music festival, the Old Town Festival, and the debate about whether businesses should be open on Sundays. Substantial content. Honest, down-to-earth news. Basically, this was Zoe’s Steffi-self. Just what she had wished for.

She was to begin February first, six weeks from now. It would be as though nothing had happened.

And so, just in time for Christmas, Zoe Schuhmacher delved back into her past. She went back to the time before Berlin and New York, and she suppressed the sinkhole in her heart as if it belonged to someone else. A psychologist would probably have told her that every ending of a relationship was like a little death; a grieving period is necessary and important. Zoe knew that. In her experience, women usually dealt with their grief by crying for weeks and stuffing their faces with gallons of ice cream. And men did it by going out for a drink, or a few, as though there was no tomorrow. Everything was fine again after that. Zoe decided to go for the male version because it involved fewer calories. The fact that it was really quite difficult to find her beloved Häagen-Dazs in Ansbach played a significant role in her decision as well.

Café Unrat at Drechsel Gardens was an Ansbach institution. In Zoe’s younger years, it had been
the
pub to go to. Since then, it had managed to do something very rare: It had become a classic. It was the Burberry trench coat of pubs. Fittingly, it was named after a professor whom Marlene Dietrich had seduced
.

On Christmas, Café Unrat always turned into a real-world Facebook. Everyone who’d grown up near Ansbach returned home to their families, from Nuremberg, Munich, Berlin, or Hamburg, in December to gather under the Christmas tree, eat Christmas goose and red cabbage, and exchange gifts. Later that evening, they would all get together, without any planning, but with the purposefulness of migratory birds, at Unrat.

“Zoe, sweetheart, it’s so nice to see you.” The maître d’, who was wearing a silly red Santa hat, hugged Zoe tightly. “Santa Baby” played in the background.

Almost everyone from Zoe’s class at Theresien High School had shown up. Up until now, Zoe had always been a big fan of high school reunions, because she was secretly a little proud that she had managed to make it out of this one-horse town, out into the big, wide world. Now, however, she felt like a has-been. Reunions were always an encounter with your own history. They were also an encounter with yourself. And Zoe Schuhmacher didn’t feel like meeting herself right now. Because reunions were only fun if your life was going well—if you could present wedding pictures of a Dr. So-and-So, your newborn triplets, or at least a house, car, and a boat. But what if you’d just been dumped and moved back into your childhood bedroom? Then you hid in the darkest corner of the bar, next to the restrooms.

So why had Zoe bothered to show up at Café Unrat at all? She felt that people who had been dumped deserved a little bit of self-indulgent masochism. And she wouldn’t let anybody take that away from her.

“Hi, excuse me. I’m looking for Zoe Schuhmacher,” she suddenly heard someone say. She couldn’t believe who was standing there in front of her.

“How did you get here?” she asked a little stupidly.

“Via GPS. Global Positioning System, to be exact. This lovely little place would be impossible to find otherwise.”

Here in Ansbach, Allegra seemed like some kind of alien. She was wearing a mustard-yellow cashmere dress under a black men’s jacket, and her hair was pulled up into one of those artful ponytails that looked more like “I’m about to attend the Oscars” than “I just worked out.”

“Allegra! Seriously!”

“Actually, I got here by Alitalia, Lufthansa, and Europcar. Naples—Rome—Frankfurt—Nuremburg—Highway A7—State Road 2223. I’ve always wanted to explore Herpersdorf by Ansbach, capital of Bavaria, Southern Germany,
mien Deern,
” the born-and-raised Hamburg native responded in Zoe’s local dialect.

Zoe was certain that Allegra had never, in her entire life, apart from Munich, set foot in the state of Bavaria.

Zoe was slowly running out of patience. “How did you know I was here?”

“Eros told me you flew back to Germany on the hush and disappeared into thin air. The editorial office contacted your parents at some point, of course. What did you think would happen?”

“What are you doing here, Al, if you already knew that I’m still alive?”

“Zoe Schuhmacher, this is an intervention!” Al answered. She wore the serious expression of a doctor on
VIP Rehab
telling his washed-up patients on live TV that it was really time they stopped doing coke.

“What?”

“An intervention
.
A rescue. Enough of all this self-pity and back-to-your-roots stuff! You don’t belong here anymore. There’s no such thing as a future in Herpersdorf.”

“And what else would you suggest I do, Miss Therapist?”

Why does everybody have to get involved with my life?
Zoe wondered, annoyed. She wanted to suffer in peace. End of story. Didn’t women measure the depth of freshly broken relationships by how long they suffered? If she had understood more math than basic fractions, she would write a binomial formula for it now. Something like:

suffering2 x length2 = depth

“I just finished the Italy part of my own Eat-Pray-Love Journey. I’m off to India in January. Do you want to come?” Al asked.

Do I?
Zoe wondered. What did she have left to lose? And she had time until February 1, anyway. Right now, she felt like those strange days between Christmas and New Year’s, which would begin tomorrow. They were neither the old nor the New Year, but some kind of desolate no-man’s-land in between. So Zoe decided spontaneously that India would be the perfect place to begin the New Year.

21

JANUARY

Zoe had always been a little intimidated by India. She would have much preferred to go to Italy, had Allegra given her any choice in the matter. Not just for the pasta, but also for the Italian guys who hit on even the ugliest tourists without batting an eyelash. Hearing a stranger call her “
cara mia!
” would make her feel like the most beautiful woman on the planet. Apart from that, Zoe wasn’t great with misery, weird smells, and maimed body parts. And in her opinion, cows belonged in a pasture, not on the street. Maybe that was the real reason that she had ended up at a women’s magazine instead of as a war reporter for CNN.

When Zoe and Allegra landed in Pune after a fifteen-minute flight from Mumbai, the temperature was 68 degrees. The humidity was surprisingly low and there was a slight breeze. A driver was already waiting for them. He explained that the name Pune came from the phrase
punya nagari
, which apparently means “city of virtue.”

Allegra hadn’t booked rooms in Elizabeth Gilbert’s ashram in Ganeshpuri, where guests were asked to scrub the floor with toothbrushes as a token of selflessness. That would have been too much for her. And besides, it ruined your fingernails. Instead, they were registered at a kind of Club Med for those in search of meaning, called Osho International Meditation Resort. During the flight, Al had informed Zoe that in the seventies, hippies came from all around the world to worship Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who later took on the name Osho. Zoe could still remember his singing followers, with their orange-red robes and shaved heads, whom she’d often seen in Nuremberg’s pedestrian zone as a teenager. They always wore such serene expressions that it worried her mother, who pulled Zoe away quickly. What Zoe didn’t know back then was that those followers had mostly found their inner peace in a horizontal position. In 1990, when Osho ascended to nirvana, his popularity quickly declined and his followers moved on to other trends—like aerobics or tarot cards. Everything had its time. But, as it’s commonly known, trends return in waves, which meant that twenty years after Osho’s death, his commune flourished once again, more strongly than ever. His very worldly Rolls Royce collection, which had been paid for with his followers’ donations, was long forgiven and forgotten.

Osho International Meditation Resort, which was about 90 miles east of Mumbai, was resurrected as a kind of spiritual service provider for well-heeled westerners who wanted to leave their soul-garbage in India. The 37-acre campus on the outskirts of Pune had a Japanese flair, with its walkways snaking around bridges that overlooked lily ponds and through high bamboo forests. A monk—or whatever they called them here at Club Meditation—greeted Zoe and Allegra.

“Welcome to India,” he said in that charming, Indian singsong tone of English. “My name is Vatsayana. India is a unique country which aspires to reach the highest goal: to find truth and to be truth.”

Well then
, Zoe thought, while Allegra nodded in eager approval. Al had long since abandoned the role of editor-in-chief—and had instead adopted the role of Julia Roberts searching for the meaning of life. It was as though Al had never intended to do anything else. Judging from what Zoe knew about Allegra, she would surely find some way to make money on this trip as well. Maybe with her own TV show for those on quests for meaning, or something like that.

The resort’s Welcome Center was decorated in subtle gray stone and natural wood. It had surely been conceptualized by some interior designer that had charged $800 an hour.

After registration, all the little sheep had to take an AIDS test. While Zoe accepted this strict rule with astonishment, Allegra only grinned with excitement.

“One less thing to worry about. Every man who comes in here is clean.”

The two friends would be staying in the Osho Guest House, which, with its camel-colored Eames chairs, lived up to the standards of any designer hotel. The next morning, at the very comfortable hour of nine o’clock, all the newcomers met up in the auditorium for the Welcome Morning. Vatsayana, the philosophical greeter from the day before, directed the salvation searchers. He was tall, thin, and sinewy, like a marathon runner. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on him. If Zoe’s grandma had seen him, she would have been overcome by her feeding reflex and served him heaps of French toast and
wiener schnitzel
to nurse him back to health. He looked like he was around forty, and Zoe realized that despite his singsong Indian English, he seemed be northern European, judging by the color of his skin.

“In this wonderful world, we all live in our personal little ponds of misery,” he said, citing Osho. “That is why we practice silent meditation here every day. It is generally difficult for visitors to step directly out of their speedy lives to sit calmly and cleanse the mind of all its refuse. We will help you with this.”

Zoe looked over at Allegra in slight annoyance. She was sitting cross-legged with a serene smile on her face. She had apparently already begun her cleansing. But Zoe really wasn’t all too sure that she wanted to part from all of her mental refuse. Wasn’t all of that part of who she was too? She decided to go for a walk. Prayer, meditation—or whatever you called it—was a very vague concept to Zoe Schuhmacher, the C&E Christian.
There is no way
Osho can repair my wounded heart
, she thought.

Here she was in the City of Virtue, and she felt further from her true self than she ever had before.

For morning meditation, Zoe put on a loose-fitting, dark-red dress that went down to her ankles. In the evening, she’d have to wear white, in accordance with the dress code. They had a dress code like at the real Club Med.

In the 90-foot-tall glass pyramid, which, according to the brochure, had a capacity of five thousand people and a disco-worthy sound and light system, there was a one-hour meditation session. First, they danced “Ring Around the Rosie” for a bit. At least, that’s what it looked like to Zoe. “To rid ourselves of unnecessary energy,” the meditation leader said. Allegra laughed happily and threw back her wavy mane. Zoe obliged her indulgently. Taking strangers by the hand—in India, at that—wasn’t really her thing. Then they sat down cross-legged on large pillows on the floor. “To let the silence fill us.”

Zoe tried to empty her brain. But how do you think of nothing? And when you were thinking of nothing, weren’t you still thinking of something? Again and again, she was haunted by images of Benni Nigmann, the annoying Aaron Papst, and, of course, Tom. And Tom again. The way he’d stood there when she saw him for the last time, completely astonished and angry, as though his wife had ruined his perfect plans for his transatlantic affair.
Actually, I should be glad there weren’t other bimbos in Germany, Switzerland, and Canada,
Zoe thought.
But maybe there were . . .

Her thoughts had already run away with her.

Silence.

Emptiness.

Bullshit.

Zoe jumped up, darted outside, and angrily threw herself onto a granite bench next to a lily pond. She’d imagined that this would be easier.

“You have to let it happen, you know,” a quiet voice behind her said.

She turned. It was Vatsayana. He was standing and she was sitting, so she felt like he was smiling down at her, a little too indulgently for her liking.

“What do you know?”

“More than you think,” he said and then drifted away.

Later, while they put on their white robes for dinner, Allegra gushed, “Isn’t it fantastic here? I met a banker from London, born Spanish. He’s so hot!”

So that’s how it is,
Zoe thought, recalling Allegra’s talent for always finding the wrong guy. Zoe was already counting the days until her flight back to Germany: nineteen to go.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were held in “India’s most hygienic cafeteria,” which did a lot to reassure Zoe. The food, which was grown on the hotel’s own organic farm, was served on the garden patio under white umbrellas. Less India was impossible. Allegra had registered for a three-day seminar called “Live here and now—through reliving your past!” Together with her sexy Spaniard, of course. She kept wanting to talk Zoe into a workshop called Growing, Flowering, Becoming One with Life: How to Manage Your Loneliness. But Zoe had stubbornly refused. Instead, she sat by the lily pond every day and brooded. Ever since she was a teenager, Zoe had always done two things: First, she had always worked. She had part-time jobs while in school, she’d had internships, she’d written articles as a freelance writer—basically she had always worked toward her career. And second, she had fallen in and out of love with guys. She had always been waiting to truly become herself. She thought that would happen automatically, all by itself, sort of like reaching legal age.

Benni Nigmann, Prince Charming On Hold, had been her first true love. But then Tom came along and flipped her whole world upside down. Zoe sighed loudly and wondered how this eternal mental movie could ever be turned off. Because in the long run, she didn’t like the film at all. And ten days at the Ashram had done nothing to help.

“A new beginning can only happen when something old ends,” a voice said. It was Vatsayana again, whose job was apparently to comfort his escaped sheep. But this time he sat down next to Zoe.

“Those endings can be pretty painful sometimes.”

“Not if you see them as beginnings.”

And then the dam broke. The entire story of Benni, Papst, and Tom came out. Especially Tom. And New York, and how she felt like Cinderella there, living in constant fear of being kicked out by the honorable Aaron Papst. Not being good enough for the sonny-boy of Katherine “Kitty” Whitney Fiorino. Basically not being good enough for the entire world. Vatsayana listened patiently and kept handing her tissues. Using up almost an entire box in one sitting had to be a new record.
Maybe psychologists are right about the grief stages,
Zoe thought.

“Let it go,” Vatsayana advised her. “You have to let it go. You can’t remain unhappy just because you fear change.”

It was kind of irritating when a stranger could see you more clearly than you could see yourself. Now both of them were sitting there in silence. For the first time, Zoe felt nothingness engulf her like a comfortable cloud of fog.

“What about you? What are you doing here? You’re not Indian by birth, are you?” Zoe asked after what seemed like an eternity once she returned to reality from her cloud. “Where are you from? Where are you going?”

“I come from nowhere, and I am going nowhere. I live in the here and now.”

The old Zoe would have just said “Well, then.” But this time she held back.

“It is how it is, Zoe. Instead of pondering things from the past that can’t be changed, you should accept them,” Vatsayana explained.

He left her sitting alone by the lily pond. Zoe tried to send love and light to everybody involved in her misery, just like Vatsayana had suggested. Benjamin Nigmann. Aaron Papst. And finally, even Tom. Although she still wasn’t quite convinced that the three of them deserved it. But maybe that would change in the remaining nine days.