The train stalls; she feels her pocket for her passport and ticket, hugs her knees. Dirty snow speckles the thick window. She rubs its interior with the sleeve of her jumper but the darkness beyond remains grubby, opaque, hiding all except a dense forest of fir trees; a compact woodland in the middle of nowhere. And it is definitely nowhere.
The engine is silent, the only sounds other passengers’ murmuring, a hiss from the brakes. Ten minutes pass. She glances at the faces for a sign as to what’s happening, but they seem oblivious. Faint smells of tobacco and sweaty feet, mould and McDonalds burgers.
Burgers. That’s what she wants. She hadn’t realised how hungry she is. She shouldn’t have left Mainz in such a rush; should’ve bought something before the long ride.
A loud clang. The door to the cabin sweeps open. The passengers, mainly young backpackers, cease talking. A panting Alsatian (or is it a German Shepherd?) has the longest, wettest tongue she’s ever seen, the sharpest black ears, the darkest eyes. The guard or soldier, holding the dog’s leash in his ominous olive-green East German uniform, is a mountain, bulky and hairy and too tall for the doorway. His peaked cap and silver epaulettes are even more frightening: they remind her of SS officers or KGB agents she’s seen in Hollywood films.
She stares as the guard spits out ‘Passports!’ in English, then she scrabbles like the others in her backpack.
*
Those ridiculous lace white gloves. At a food festival in the park. Middle of winter, freezing by Sydney standards, and she held two plastic cups of red wine. Her friend Bonnie was away somewhere, probably in the portaloo queue. The women’s line was long, but not the men’s. As usual.
‘One for me?’ an accented voice said behind her, and she began a conversation with a lanky German tourist. ‘Why are you here?’ ‘What do you do?’ The usual questions. Achim was a doctor, attending a conference at Sydney Uni. ‘I went there,’ she said, and handed him a wine. Bonnie would have to wait. ‘I really love your gloves,’ he said more than once, and she was pleased with herself, felt eccentric, avant garde, a bit giddy. Attractive – not a sensation she experienced often.
Later she had sex with him in his cheapish hotel in the Cross (Bonnie was elsewhere, probably fucking another guy they met at Baron’s around 2 am.) He made her wear the gloves, nothing else. In the back of her diary he scribbled his address in Mainz. She said, nervously, that she’d write and, haha, maybe visit him one day. In the year that followed he sent her a few short amusing letters, and she sent him postcards of froth and natter.
*
As the guard draws closer she tries to not move, to sit like a good girl. Although she has, yes, a frisson of excitement, a more intense frisson than anything she’s experienced in her brief and sheltered twenty-one years – although she hopes she comes across as bravely bohemian – she is still terrified of Getting in Trouble; she hasn’t called her parents with the update that she’s on the way to Berlin, through East Germany, she’s travelling alone; she left Achim’s apartment and caught the first bus to Mainz Hauptbahnhof and bought a ticket without thinking it through – without Thinking of the Consequences. A very daring move.
But in hindsight, now that the guard and his ferocious Alsatian check each passenger’s ticket and passport and move closer and closer towards her she fears she’s been a Lazy Girl, hasn’t Thought it Through. Her father would be furious. And afraid. God knows where this might end up. She tries to arrange the correct face for the guard. The dog snarls at her, salivates on her boots.
*
After completing her university degree and working for a year as a graduate trainee, she announced she was taking a gap year. She saved a bit – probably not enough to travel for twelve months around Europe but that was okay, she’d get a job in France or Italy or London. ‘Who knows. Who cares!’ she said to Bonnie. The thrill of being twenty-one and travelling alone. Her first time overseas. First time in a plane.
*
‘Passport!’ the guard spits at her, as if she’s already committed a crime in some way.
‘Yes sir,’ she says, and metaphorically kicks herself. After high school – after a brief job in the all-men Australia Club in Macquarie Street – she vowed she’d never call anyone sir again.
But this guy – this man – this soldier – reeks of menace.
Impassively he runs his bear-like eyes over her passport, then hands it to another guard behind her. ‘Get off!’ he roars at her.
The forest is a dense barricade on both sides of the train. But she doesn’t dare ask him why, or where she’s to go.
*
Her diary clutched in her hand, open to the addresses page, she called Achim from Mainz train station. Perhaps she should have rung him from London – she was there for two months working in that crappy caff – but somehow she never quite got around to it. Living there was expensive, using the phone was pricey – her parents complained when she reverse-called. Perhaps it was just a fear that he’d say no; or not remember her.
He was certainly shocked when he answered, but polite. Gentlemanly. Came to the station to collect her.
‘I’m just here for a day or so,’ she lied. ‘Then I might go to Berlin. Or Sweden.’ She shrugged. ‘I can stay at your place, can’t I?’
His gallantry remained promising, for a time. She slept with him that night, and the next, as expected. The country was similar to Sydney in so many ways. Except: the toilet bowl with its protruding shelf, like a ledge for trophies (it was unbearable seeing one’s own faeces so blatantly); the aggressiveness of the nightclubs and their patrons, as if the world were to end tomorrow; the hard-to-avoid black history. Nevertheless she enjoyed, in the encroaching autumn, his cosy one-room apartment, his tidy collection of books in different languages, his compelling but unsettling Expressionism artworks.
But one night he yelled at her when he returned from the hospital. She’d been listening to his albums and had left the LPs sitting on their plastic sleeves, hadn’t inserted them in their covers. Hadn’t returned the albums to their alphabetical place on his shelf.
She apologised. They fucked. He demanded that she wear her gloves and she was too contrite to say no.
She quizzed him about his parents; didn’t dare ask if they were Nazis. He spoke of them as if they were unbearable. He maintained he was gay for years, he said, just to annoy them. Wore dresses just to see the upset on their faces. Dated a girl whose parents were survivors of Neuengamme.
She suspected he was seriously fucked up. But this was part of the titillation of travel, wasn’t it? Another entertaining story to recite at dinners with friends. It was the eighties so, as people kept saying, no holds barred.
One night he called her into the bathroom. His voice was stern, knuckles clenched at his sides. ‘When I use the toilet I use one sheet of toilet paper only. Just one sheet!’
She had no idea what to say. Was tempted to ask what a woman with her periods was supposed to do. Or anyone using their bowels. But didn’t. He was, well, a bit scary.
*
The metal steps from the wagon clang noisily, but don’t reach the ground; she leaps the last half-foot. The ground is rigid, ice-speckled. Luckily she was still wearing the cheap but thick red jacket, bought in Camden Markets, when the guard appeared; otherwise she’d be no doubt be frozen.
It’s probably very pretty out here, the curtain of dark-olive firs sparkling with snow like a Christmas tree, but her alarmed brain refuses to appreciate it. She stares along the track: no lights. One way disappears into shadows and woodland and an unsettling mist; the other way disappears into shadows and woodland and an unsettling mist, but at least is luminated by a half-arsed moon. Eeenie-meeny-myny-mo, she counts; heads away from the darkness.
*
Her backpack was so heavy. Too heavy to take on a short trip to Berlin, a city Achim said she must visit. So she borrowed a small valise from him and left hers at his apartment. Part of her knew it’d be best to say goodbye forever; but she was so tired of that damned backpack. On an envelope Achim wrote the name of a friend to call when she arrived.
*
It seems she’s been walking beside the carriages for hours; though she knows only ten minutes have passed. Trains aren’t that lengthy. Treading so close to the huge wheels she keeps grazing against them and their choking diesel. There are no signs, not even unreadable German ones, and iciness nips her fingers. She feels naked without her gloves; but even nuder without her wallet – her only credit card, her few deutschemarks, her address and phone book – they’re in the valise. In the train’s cabin. And that giant of a soldier took her passport.
She was thrilled at first – this was a story to tell when she returned home, a memory of intimidating soldiers and salivating Alsatians and threatening Grimm-like woods, so unlike the blindingly sunny days of Sydney. Now the thrill sharpens into panic. Why do the soldiers want her off the train? Are they somehow aware she’d written an anti-Stalin thesis at uni? Pro Bulgakov and Pasternak?
She considers crying out, climbing back into one of the carriages, and almost screams when the track curves and a floodlight shines brutally a few metres away.
*
Behind Achim a woman reclined comfortably on his low sofa. ‘My friend, Irma,’ he said. ‘How was Berlin?’
He poured her a wine from a near empty bottle. Irma’s hair was messy, Achim had a clichéd smear of lipstick on his cheek. She was so charged with jealousy she spilled the wine.
‘What’s that woman doing here?’ she whispered, aware she sounded peevish, unfair, as he carried his valise along the hallway.
‘A friend of mine.’
The bedroom smelled of sex, the bed was rumpled and unmade. She sat on the carpet and cried and when he didn’t come in she returned to the loungeroom. The friend had gone.
‘I don’t know what your problem is,’ he said, and switched on the tv. After a few minutes of silence he asked coldly: ‘Who do you think you are? What do you want of me?’
She slept on the sofa that night. As she wiped honey on her toast the next morning he snapped at her for failing to fold the sheets correctly.
*
The floodlight exposes a hut and a small group; as she moves closer, cautiously, she can see they’re young, about her age, talking quietly with nervous grins. They appear to be in a cursory queue, hugging themselves in the cold. Beside the hut’s door stands a guard, his arms crossed, his demonic dog crouched beside him. They pause their conversation as she approaches, alerted by her boots crunching on the ice and gravel, then one opens her arms.
‘Don’t look so worried, girl!’ she says, her American accent abrupt in the darkness and fog.
The guard jumps quickly, his rifle in one hand, and the dog growls.
‘What’s happening?’ she asks cagily. ‘What are they gonna do to us?’
‘Where you from?’ asks the American.
She tells her, and the group chuckles; realises everyone here is speaking English.
An Indian girl says, ‘They’re just checking non-Europeans. You’ll be okay.’
‘Unless you’re a spy,’ says the Yank. A few laugh; some snap at her to shush.
‘They don’t like jokes like that,’ says the Indian, and heads nod.
‘Where are we?’
‘The border, silly,’ says the Yank.
It doesn’t take long. When she reaches the front of the queue the soldier sitting at a desk in the hut asks her name, then forages in a file, pulls out her passport, stamps it and thrusts it at her. He doesn’t catch her eyes, doesn’t seem to care. Just snarls, ‘Next!’
They trek back to the carriages. The valise is where she left it. The train eventually moves; although a tiny part of her is disappointed at this anti-climactic ending her legs shake for the remainder of the ride.
*
She’s underwhelmed by West Berlin – so much history blown away by a war, the tedium of modern architecture. But overwhelmed by Checkpoint Charlie, by the Wall: the despondent people carrying signs, some in English – ‘Let my Eva go’; ‘Free the father of my children!’, ‘I love you Ilona!’ – the sentries’ machine guns, the never-ending spectrum of multicoloured graffiti and murals, the barbed wire. The roofs on the other side, the East, poking above with hunched shoulders, a macrocosm away – god knows what the people in those tenements are doing, thinking.
As she attempts to find a cheap hostel in a worryingly cheap area she considers speaking to the tourist office about visas for East Berlin; is not sure she has the nerve to deal with more military. Is still rattled by the bathos of the night before. Her hair is greasy, her periods are heavy, she needs a shower. On the bleak street a large overweight man approaches her. ‘Fucky fuck?’ he asks, and holds out a wad of deutschemarks. She stares at him – it’s ten in the morning, her Let’s Go Europe 1984 is in her hand, for fuck’s sake – and he runs away. She desperately requires comfort – in a prim, middle-class hotel she books a room with its own bathroom and luxuriates under the hot shower for ten minutes. In the foyer she calls Achim’s friend.
Rainer’s curls are a woolly yellow, his body and face sinewy but sultry. Like Achim he’s a doctor, working in a local hospital, with unusual hours. After visiting the Tiergarten he takes her to a beerhouse near the Ku’damm and cavorts and laughs and recounts amusing stories of Achim’s time at uni, asks her questions about her love life in Sydney, sex with Achim, and keeps his blue eyes on hers constantly, disarmingly. He endlessly brushes her breasts, squeezes her thigh. Laughs when she sweeps his hand aside. Talks her into visiting a cinema to watch German porn and although she giggles and whispers about the solitary men in the dark rows behind them, she brims with trepidation. Despite her assurances that she could reach the hotel on the U-Bahn, he travels with her, making jokes while attempting to nibble her neck. At the door she says thank you; he smiles pitifully, holds his hands prayer-like, asks for one drink, please, promises he’ll leave, but she remains adamant. His smile abruptly alters; he punches the door and asks why she led him on. She asserts she didn’t; then why, he snarls, why did she see a porno with him? Drink so much? Let him escort her to this out-of-the-way hotel? He moves to embrace her, she shoves him away.
After she shuts the hotel door in his face, after the receptionist yells at him in German and she watches him stomp away into the street’s shadows, she swiftly climbs the stairs to her room, gets Achim’s phone number; calls him from the foyer phone.
The return train through East Germany to Mainz is far from harrowing. She dozes, reads the Gunter Grass novel she bought in the Bahnhof Zoo station, purchases fried potatoes and sips beer. But each time the train slows in the dense, gloomy forest her heart beats hard, she chews her fingernails and prays.
Achim isn’t so happy to see her this time; asks when she’s leaving. His coolness extends to the bedroom, the dining room, in front of the tv; finally he asks her why she slept with his friend in Berlin. Are all Australian girls whores?
Stuttering, teary, she denies it all, but he doesn’t listen. She sleeps on the sofa. Next morning the closing front door wakes her, and she reads a note left on the dining table. He’s asked her to be gone before he returns. She holds her head in her hands, begins to write a letter with the truth of what happened with Rainer; then realises she can’t be bothered; it doesn’t matter. This too is just another dinner-party tale. It’s time to leave. She wanders the flat, opening drawers, moving albums out of alphabetical order, dragging clothes from his wardrobe and dumping them on the floor. Rearranges the cutlery and plates, turns off the heating, props the fridge door open. Reorganises the books in his small library. Flushes half a roll of toilet paper. After she’s showered and dressed and finished packing she glances at the mess she’s made, and notices a panelled walnut cabinet in the little parlour that she hasn’t opened. It’s locked, but the cabinet is dated, antique probably, so with a knife from the kitchen she fiddles with the brass lock until it snaps open. Inside is a collection of porcelain china; she doesn’t have the heart to smash it, they’re obviously expensive and probably belonged to his parents, but she rearranges them anyway. Tucked away in the far back of the cupboard’s bottom shelf is a polished mahogany box. She removes it, unwinds its frayed ribbon, nudges apart a silken wrap and finds a pair of white ceramic salt and pepper shakers.
She lifts the salt shaker, carefully turns it around: on its side in a beautiful black gothic font are the letters SS. On its base is a tiny swastika. Underneath the silken wrap she finds a yellowing note with a swastika header; although it’s in German she can see it’s addressed to someone with Achim’s surname, and is signed by what appears to read ‘Joseph Goebbels’.
She rewraps the shakers, ties the ribbon around the box, and stows it carefully in her backpack.
This will definitely be something entertaining to relay at dinner parties. And who knows? Perhaps she’ll visit Germany again. With a photo of the shakers. Photos that will definitely be of interest to the chiefs of staff at Achim’s and Rainer’s hospitals. To local newspapers.
It’d serve them right.
Photo by Derek Story on Unsplash
