The other day, sitting around naked in a Bavarian hotel with a woman I’d just met, I thought of the best-mannered person I ever knew. Andrzej came from an elegant Warsaw family. I met him at the very end of his long and difficult life, when he was singing “Sto Lat” at his American grandsons’ birthday parties. His gift was for keeping his cool and putting others at ease. One summer weekend in the 1920s he was strolling along some Pomeranian beach when he saw a dapper little man who looked like his father approaching, arm in arm with a much younger woman. Andrzej tipped his hat. Andrzej’s father tipped his hat. The two walked by one another without breaking stride.
Andrzej had a feel for these situations. At a grand house party between the wars, a distraught friend confessed that he had embarrassed the imperious hostess by walking into a bathroom while she was using it. What could he have done? She had left the door ajar! Andrzej told the friend he should have turned away immediately and shouted, “Excuse me, sir!” permitting the hostess to convince herself that, while she might have been caught in an embarrassing position, she had at least not been seen
in one.
A few years after the Second World War, when Germans were not terribly comfortable in the company of Poles, Andrzej would lower tensions by telling the Germans he met that of course he spoke good German—he had had five years’ instruction paid for by the German state. If he found them sympathetic he would forbear telling them that this “instruction” had taken place in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp north of Berlin.
It is only because Andrzej’s son is my friend that I know these stories. They have stuck in my head.
Two weeks ago, I could have used Andrzej’s talent for managing women, Germans, and surprise. I was in Passau, a city once known for its cathedral and the cliffs across the Danube, and now known for its Middle Eastern refugees.
I had walked the cliffs in the morning, despite a minor leg injury. By the end of the day it was killing me. “Why don’t you take a sauna?” said the receptionist. She gave me a bushel-bag with slippers, a terrycloth robe, and the key. Dressed in just the robe, I took the elevator up. The room was thick with steam. I hung up the robe, kicked off my slippers, and was padding towards the door from which steam was emerging, when I almost bumped into a woman who, as I say, had no more clothing on than I had.
We were close enough, and facing each other squarely enough, that Andrzej’s “Excuse me, sir!” would have earned me either a slap in the face or a trip to an insane asylum. “Entschuldigung!” I said. “I was looking for the sauna.”
“This is the sauna,” she said, welcomingly. “My husband’s in there.”
I walked over as quickly as I could without slipping on the floor, and just as the man and I were introducing ourselves, she came back in. I was embarrassed. Not for an instant had it occurred to me that the sauna might be co-ed. I looked at the bucket and the water ladle in the far corner and folded my hands on my thighs. I explained that the last sauna I had taken was with my father, in the men’s locker room of our local YMCA, sometime during the Carter administration.
“I will show you how,” said the man. It had been ten minutes, he said. Time to hose ourselves down. Any longer would be bad for our hearts. He turned on a cold-water hose that was coiled on the wall and began to shout: “Einmal! Zweimal! Dreimal!” as he danced around flopping the water methodically up one leg and then up the other. “Right leg first!” he hollered. “Now the arm! Always right first, then left! For the heart!” He was twirling the hose around in loops, and it was clear that he was spouting nineteenth-century anatomical mysticism from the world of Three Men on the Bummel. Zee blood flees zee icy water, rushing from zee extremities into zee heart, where it is safe and happy.
We went back in the sauna for another ten-minute round. I was coming to like these eccentric old valetudinarians. But then I remembered having read that, in some country, when people finish a sauna, they whack each other on the back with branches. Was that Germany? Probably not. But after my friend’s hose dance, anything seemed possible. I bid them auf Wiedersehen.
I had an interview with the mayor that afternoon. It finished around 7 p.m., and I decided to get a quick dinner. There was a little working-class barroom where I’d had a superb ham hock (Schweinshaxe) two days before. There were no tables, but then I heard someone shouting, “Komm! Komm!” It was my friends. We had another nice talk and I ordered the Blutwurst special. What a stroke of luck to have found them, I said. I almost hadn’t recognized them with clothes on.
