The Pyg (2020)

I like working at the Pyg, because it reminds me of a sandwich shop in Lincoln Park near DePaul University called the Bourgeois Pig. They played Hot Club Jazz for an attic of us hyperfocused grad students feverishly typing away at our Macs.  The keyboard sounds offered Django some polyrhythm.

Normally, people approach me at the Pyg and, in heavily accented French, request a Guinness. A "wee-ness." "Zhih prawn awn wee-ness." I'd smile at the unintentionally phallic nature of the request.

Once a small, fuzzy Spaniard came in and gave me a sincere attempt at an Irish accent, because apparently, I had one, too. I could have been a bitch and argued that his faux pas was heinous as asking an Argentinian if had spaghetti in his pockets, but I didn't mind his clowning and let him go on. When he stopped, I attempted to mind the gap and responded to him in his own language.

"From hoo-air is your assent? It's vaydee pretty...

"Chew pretty. Look at chew...rubia." He raised his eyebrows and bit his lower lip with expectation.

I smiled. He was really asking me to explain why I look like I’m from Scandinavia and speak Spanish like I drank three Red Bulls after a root canal. “D'ningun' parte. Y tod'l mundo." I pulled a weeness for him. “Algo más?”

Back home, my sisters and I sing, somos los tres tamales: pale outside, spicy inside.

Sometimes I receive a request for a "hut tuddEEH," which I love, because I also pour some hot water for my own spiked glass of tea below the forgiving horizontal slab of wood that separates the world of Bartender from the world of Customer. The tea is a stale Irish Breakfast that we couldn't find at Auchon and have to enlist the slave workers of Amazon to ship it from the East.

Today as I sip from the thick glass mug, I stare out a thousand-year window at the Alzette, into which I had once helped my ex to vomit after he had been kicked out of one of the seedy bars. He refused to set foot in the club, as there were, according to him, a mass influx of prepubescents. I do believe him.

It is a beautiful river that cuts through a city that would, to the unassuming, be a home for fairies. But the castle is a bank, and the people are a mixed bag of Luxembourgish, French, German, Belgian, and Portuguese. The latter is, according to the former groups, a cut under the rest (though in truth they might be jealous, because these Portuguese-Luxembourgish people live free of expectation while other communities try to one-up each other in flashier Prada suits), and I can see their neighborhood on the hill, with their multicolored abodes connected by a network of clotheslines.

Sometimes the manager puts on the main Luxembourgish radio station with its pop hits, and sometimes a Spotify channel with fiddlers who adeptly crossed strings wailing hackneyed odes to washerwomen and swallowtails. Today, Brahms sputters and spittles off an old 45 on a tiny record player the bar owner presumably carried down from the attic. There aren’t any resale shops to my knowledge for miles around, so it must be so. It’s a nice break of pace, and majestic background music for my minute-long purveyance of the Alzette.

Another customer had approached the bar without my noticing.

My ex’s mom. No, somebody who just looks like her. She’s thin and hunchbacked, a short shock of white hair, an oversized abstract pin, funky art-house glasses. She definitely has Chagall prints hanging in her bathroom.

“Bitte ein Bit,” her throat creaks out, a wry smirk knotting up her face. I like this lady. Hands shaking like she had curled twenty-pound weights over the previous hour, she gingerly places a bill and exact change on the bar.

I have no other customers, so I’ll indulge her. “Wie viel, um...Schaum?” I point to the frothy head on our Bitburger poster.

“Bitte ein little bit.” Her gnarled, pale finger and thumb measure out a centimeter for me.

We snicker together. I’ll angle the glass just a little bit longer when I pull the tap. The new keg spits and hacks, but that’s no challenge, and soon a stream of creamy pils glides into the glass’s tall curves. It feels cool and fresh on my warm fingers.

I throw a coaster down and center the glass on top of it. The old lady and I share a smile, and she raises her eyebrows as she takes that first frothy sip.

My ex's mom died from coronavirus earlier this year. I didn't go to the funeral. I couldn't, with the travel bans.

She'd had bowel cancer for the latter half of the decade I was close to her. It was terrible to witness her pain. I lived with her for five summers in an apartment that overlooked the mist and forest.

She sold that apartment five years ago so that her son could move to Chicago to live with me and study at an American university. She died alone in a rest home. Each of these facts drives a needle through my chest, a pink flush of guilt washing over me. I feel indebted to her, like I should have been there, even after her son and I broke up.

"Stimmt irgendetwas nicht?" The lady is watching me stare at her from across the bar, a cream rag in my upturned palm. She blinks behind her glasses, which I can guess from her magnified eyes were to correct some severe farsightedness.

"Nee...nee. Sorry." I put my head down and scrub the bar with feigned purpose.

"You seem to be like some-tsing. You look...wie sagst du traurig auf Englisch?"

"Sad? Please don't worry about me. I'm just spacing out."

She mouths "spacing out" and quizzically scrutinizes the ceiling as she takes another drink.

"Um, geistig...geistig weggetreten. Spaced out." I can't believe I pulled that out of my ass, as it's been years since I spoke German fluently.

My ex's mom, Inge, took her position as one of the translators for the European Union seriously. Unlike me, she was a language conservativist, and she insisted I speak only German in her home. When I first arrived in Luxembourg in 2013, I did not know a lick of German and, in my pre-disillusionment romantic mindset, I only assumed she would be my mother in law for the rest of my life, so you can assume how terrifying this was. She was militant in her endeavor to excise the English from my being, and, when my ex explained to me why this was true, it made sense:

Inge was born in 1927. Her family were Nazis, and she grew up in this culture. After the war, she did her best to serve her penance, becoming a proponent of an inclusive European identity and adopting children from around the world, not stopping even when she was legally too old to do so. My ex, Kyle, was Afro-Brazilian, for example. However, there were still vestiges of her cultural conservativism that cropped up every once in a while, and language was a part of that.

She was a kind person and a giving person: she was no Nazi. But I'll be damned if she wasn't downright truculent at times. Getting her to eat something other than soup, for example, was an absolute battle. She had become so thin.

Now I realize that I had a lot in common with her. I wasn't brought up a Nazi--on the contrary, my family were Litvak camp survivors who escaped to the Caribbean--but we shared inherited trauma. And we shared guilt.

I felt such guilt when she died that, as soon as the whole embargo was lifted, I took advantage of my heritage's entitlement and moved to Europe with Lithuanian citizenship. Of course, I also felt guilty jetting to a beautiful locale on the backs of my dead ancestors. I just got a job teaching at the Ecole Européenne du Luxembourg after leaving my teaching job in the States, but I've been moonlighting here at the Pyg to pay for a room in a shared house on the outskirts of the city.

It wasn't the city that drove me back to Luxembourg. It wasn't the history, or the economy, or the need to address its social class issues to its youth It was guilt--guilt for not being there for Inge, guilt for it not working out with her son for whom she had sacrificed everything, guilt for spending a few lackadaisical weeks hocking wee-ness for my rent, guilt for not living up to my family's legacy and becoming some lauded professor of Jewish Studies.

For once, I'm not that ashamed of owning up to any of this. Thank you, Inge. Inge!

"Möchten Sie noch etwas...trinken?" I ask the end of the bar, but Inge's doppelgänger has left.

Another pang of guilt. I slide my rag to wipe down her spot, and there is a note there:

Dienst ist dienst und Schnaps ist Schnaps. 

It’s a German saying that means “work is work, and liquor is liquor:” separate play and work. 

And then, below that:

Wenn Sorge dein Schnaps ist, wast ist dann deine Dienst?

“When worry’s your liquor, then what’s work?”

I smile, throw my rag into the washbin, and walk out of the Pyg.

Maybe I'll move to Lisbon tomorrow and become an English tutor who spends her days at the beach. Why not?