Disciplining your inner child the German way: "Past Perfect Continuous" by Dounia Choukri

I have no idea how the order of stories in the O.Henry anthologies are chosen. In Best American Short Stories, it's simply alphabetic order based on author surnames. That means when there is something weirdly similar about two consecutive stories in the collection, as my blogging buddy Karen Carlson and I both often seem to think we see, it really is just a coincidence. O.Henry definitely doesn't use alphabetical order, so I assume the similarities between "Past Perfect Continuous" and the two stories before it ("Stop-n-Go" and "Lucky Dragon") is intentional. It's the third straight story where World War II is important in some way. Like "Stop-n-Go," the power of memory to shape reality and change our perceptions of time is a key theme, while it also shares "Lucky Dragon"'s interest in how a nation re-shapes its psyche after losing a war it was wrong to start.

In this case, it's Germany, not Japan, and there are echoes not of a Samurai code of honor and its attendant sense of shame, but Nazis who still walk among us. The presence of Nazis still in the picture, as well as photos of "hollow-eyed World War II soldiers lying on the side of the road on page 135" of a school girl's textbook do not allow the grown-up generation to look back on the past with the usual nostalgia.

It is the narrator's Nazi aunt whose words open the story, ripping apart any sense that the past was better: "The past is so fat, no one would ever know if you slipped a lie into its armpit." However, not all the adults share her contempt for the past. The parents of our 13-year-old narrator do allow themselves to re-shape their former days according to their liking, assuring themselves that "there will never be the likes again!" and "Those were the days!" They are momentarily nonplussed by the girl's question, "But what about the Second World War, huh? Were those the good old days?" But they recover, seeing even in this horror some kind of good: "When the past sucks it just becomes a welcome lesson in how not to do things." It's a very forward-looking answer.

The parents and grandparents are stereotypical Germans according to what most of the world thinks about them. I really do not know much about Germany, but that didn't affect my ability to read the story, because the characters draw from a very easy-to-recognize palette of German traits. The parents are practical, stolid, stoic, disciplined, hardworking, and focused more on the present and future than the past.

"Our women braved north German winters in clumpy shoes that gave them chilblains. They married early and stayed married to reasonable men with ice-blue eyes, men who only traveled in wartime. When the rest of the family had gone to sleep on starched sheets, they would sit in the halo of their own silence and mend the clothes as wounds on their own skin. By the time their faces were as threadbare as their husbands' last fine-rib undershirt, their past would be woven into a fixed memory, the first spring after the war or that summer when the goat had clambered up the stairs and nibbled on the sleeping children's chins." 

I don't know much about Germany beyond stereotypes, but that didn't really ruin my reading of this story. 

But Aunt Gunhild, an iconoclast who smokes and lives alone (her Nazi husband killed early in the war), has a different relationship to the past, the present, and the future. If most of the members of the narrator's family white-wash the past, put their nose to the grindstone in the present, and are apprehensive about the future, Gunhild, perhaps because she is not sentimental about the past nor is she denying herself in the present, has a more optimistic view of what is yet to come.

The narrator is coming of age, and trying to negotiate for herself how she will internalize time. This is partly expressed in the girl's burgeoning awareness of grammatical tenses, an awareness that is full of the double meaning in "past perfect," both a fully completed action at some time in the past, but also the way people sometimes view the past as without stain.

She is already learning that time flies and with it comes change. The boy she used to wrestle with in an innocent and childish way ended up on top of her the last time they got into a play scuffle, "as if I were a raft on a river he'd wanted to explore." Now the future is frightening, full of "breasts, bras, boys." Aunt Gunhild tries to impart a sense of hope for the future to the girl, asking her what she wants to do with her life and reassuring her, when the girl finds herself wishing for a "past without the need to fill in the present," that she is "so very lucky to be growing up in this day and age."

Theft continually crops up in the story. The narrator's friends begin daring each other to shoplift. Aunt Gunhild, it turns out, is a kleptomaniac. What's this got to do with time and growing up and growing old? Time steals our past from us. The girl doesn't steal items like her friends do, preferring instead to pilfer mementos with value only to her.

The girl eventually learns a sort of middle road between starry-eyed nostalgia for the past and callous disregard for it. We all long for a past with meaning. It's why it's "important that stories are recorded for the future." We can be clear-eyed about the past without being cruel to our feelings for it.

This kindness to the past is actually expressed early on in the story: "If the past is another country, then it must be lenient toward trespassers." But it isn't until this country of the past is linked to the present that hope arrives for the girl. She realizes that "the present was another country" just as the Berlin Wall is falling, and the entire country, now reunited again as it once was, weeps for the old days and weeps for the present. "It was history. Everything was liquid."

I don't normally care much for time-related themes. It seems like writing literature about gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. It's just how the universe is, and a difficult stone from which to draw the water of a story. The most interesting aspect of time to me is how traitorous it is to the human psyche. We make mistakes, and through those mistakes we change and become new people, but our present selves continue to be harmed by decisions made by a former self we no longer are. This drove me crazy in the Marine Corps, where I learned early on what a dumb, dumb mistake it had been to join but still had to stay in for six years because a foolish younger person with my name had signed a contract. I'm sure prisoners feel this in a much stronger way, serving out a sentence for something carried out by a person they no longer recognize. But the Proustian fetishization of time never really appealed to me.

So this story had some bias to get over for me, and it managed to do it. It did it through pithy observations and a focus on the human reality of time rather than time as a philosophical curiosity. As I try to push through my adult life occasionally apologetic to the young person I used to be who is now stuck inside a grown man who hasn't accomplished much of anything that younger person wanted to do in life, I appreciated the message of the need to be kind to our past, present, and future selves.