Cultural exchange

I missed a call the other day from an American phone number, area code 323. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message, and I was dying to know who in the States a) knew my Austrian cell number and b) would call from an actual phone and not with Skype.

An hour and a half later the phone rings again, and this time I hear it in time to answer.

“Hah-low?” booms an unfamiliar male voice. “Seed-nee?”

“Ja,” I say uncertainly. Maybe it’s not an American number after all. “Das ist Sydney.”

“Hah-low,” the voice repeats. “Es ist MAHN-fred.”

Manfred? Do I know someone named Manfred? The name sounds familiar. I’m getting an image of a man, mid-forties, overweight and balding. The details start to sharpen: gold chain, fedora, moustache, inexplicably haggard eyes. And cigarette smoke. Suddenly I smell stale cigarette smoke.

Oh. That Manfred.

Shortly after I arrived here in October, I had a brief gig with a private language school that desperately needed someone who spoke American English. They paid me under the table to give ten hours of private help within two weeks to this guy who was about to leave for America on business.

Whatever I expected, and I didn’t expect much, it wasn’t a cross between a cowboy and every sleazy Eastern European you’ve ever seen in a bad movie. Manfred.

Manfred digs tunnels, and he is very good at what he does. When somebody somewhere in the course of putting in a subway or whatever else you need a tunnel for discovers the ground is too soft and the tunnel keeps caving in, they call Manfred’s boss, who calls Manfred. He high-tails it to the work site and employs his expert knowledge of rebar and other structural reinforcements to patch things back up.

The way he told it to me, he traveled all around the world, spending weeks or months in the Philippines, Brazil, Germany, Ukraine, Iran, or wherever else a tunnel needed digging. He would work twelve-hour days six days a week until the job was done and then take his overtime pay and blow it on several weeks R and R. His hobbies seemed to be limited to drinking, traveling, and fishing. I was careful not to ask what he did with his time off in the Philippines.

He’d been in Seattle for three months the previous spring, which was where he’d learned English, and was scheduled to leave for LA at the end of October. He’d picked up English pretty quickly, but was still a bit mystified by some of the slang used around the construction site and had talked his company into paying for private lessons to brush up before his re-entry into American society. That’s where I came in – a bona fide American, college educated, upper-middle class and fully prepared to explain the ins and outs of a Los Angeles construction crew.

We would meet at the language school every few days and make painful small talk for about twenty minutes. Then Manfred would tell me in his halting English about some experience he’d had in Seattle and ask me to explain it. Why did the checkers at the supermarket always have to make conversation with the customers? Talk, talk, talk, it slowed things down too much. And why wouldn’t the girl at the coffee shop he went to every day drive out to Mt. St. Helens with him?

I’d do my best to answer his questions, and then after about forty-five minutes, Manfred would start to fidget and suggest we go outside for a smoke. He’d have a cigarette in his mouth almost before we got out the door, and we’d walk the length of the parking lot while he smoked and pointed to various parts of the building or the nearby cars and ask for their English names.

A favorite topic of conversation was the classification and naming of different sized rocks. How big was too big for gravel? And what did you call something bigger than gravel but not bigger than your fist? What should he say when he needed a rock about this big (holding his hands about six inches apart)? What about this big (pointing to a rock on the ground)?

Bit by bit, I learned more about him. He showed me photos of his house, his brother, his girlfriend, her daughter. He lived right near the Slovenian border, and when he needed cigarettes or wanted to go drinking, zip, he’d pop across. He had a noise and accompanying gesture to indicate driving which suggested to me that zipping and popping were not just idle word choices.

In his past lives, Manfred had been a downhill skier, ski instructor, car mechanic, and had worked with explosives, although I was never quite clear in what capacity. Now, he seemed to be happy with his nomadic tunnel-digging existence, although he looked forward to retirement, when he would be able to sit around and fish all day.

We would talk for about an hour and a half, he would tell me to write down two hours on the log and then give me a lift home in his BMW, which had seen better days and sported an inconspicuous hammer and sickle on the front bumper. During our last meeting, he asked for my phone number and said he’d give me a call when he was back in Austria in December and tell me all about Los Angeles. I never heard from him.

Now here he is, calling all the way from LA. We chat a bit in German; he asks how I’m doing and whether I like Austria. I tell him I’m fine and Austria is lovely. How is he? Gut. How is Los Angeles? Kalt. Minus two today. I am intrigued by this piece of news, and also a bit guilty, since I told him before he left that Los Angeles would be fairly warm compared to Austria.

And how is work? Work is work. It goes on.

Try as I might, I can discern no particular reason for this phone call. He apologizes for not calling when he was in the country, but he was only here for four days. He tells me he will be back in mid-April and when he finds out I won’t leave until the end of May, assures me that he will call when he returns.

Have I seen much of Austria yet? Not too much, just Salzburg, Vienna, and Klagenfurt. I tell him how much I liked Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital. My German is wearing thin at this point, but I think he is pleased, and tells me that when he gets back, we’ll drive down to Ljubljana. An image of the trip flashes before my eyes. I’m in the passenger seat holding on for dear life as Manfred drives hell-for-leather towards the Slovenian border. I decide it could be fun.

Manfred asks for my email address and I give it to him, trying my best to spell out my last name in German. We have some confusion over i’s and e’s and I doubt he has managed to get everything straight. I’m impressed that he’s gotten the hang of the whole email thing; he could barely turn the computer on back in October. I try to imagine what kind of email he will send. My money is on brief and to the point, although I can’t begin to fathom what that point will be.

And as abruptly as it began, the conversation is over. Manfred promises again to call in April and to email me in the meantime. I say goodbye, opting for “ciao” over “tschüss” (German for “Cheerio!” Can be made even more twee by saying “tschüssi!”) or the particularly Austrian “wiederschauen.”

I picture Manfred sitting in some extended-stay hotel in Los Angeles after a ten- or twelve-hour day, flipping through the channels and eating Chinese take-out straight from the carton. I find this prospect momentarily depressing, until I remember that he spent some time in Iran, where according to him, there was absolutely nothing to do. No TV, no radio, no drinking, no girls. He’s in LA. What better place for an Eastern European tunnel-digging cowboy?