Perfect Strangers: Two Trips to Germany
Copyright (2000) Ian Hocking
Author's Note
Below is an article describing the events of my first and second trips to Germany, which took place in the summer of 2000. The primary reason for putting this article on the web is to satisfy all those people who’ve asked me to do so. The secondary reason is naked egomania. Despite the second reason, I've checked my usual urge to Brasso the sentences, and I've even left in some of the original German-language errors (the primary reason being posterity, the secondary reason being laziness).
I wrote this article in the months before I took up a position as a PhD student at Exeter (you’ll see a similar position at the back of any given lecture theatre on a warm Friday afternoon). Most of the English friends I describe within were fellow students. They are now scattered, alas, to the corners of our singular globe, but sometimes return to Exeter for a pint at the Imperial. Here’s to them.
Here, also, is the manuscript’s original dedication:
To Britta: Neither strange nor perfect, but always trying.
As time went by, Britta, rather tryingly, became more perfect than was strictly necessary, and I was forced to resort to Romantic Moves. We’ve been together now for five years.
Part One: Where am I?
One: July 4th, Independence Day
According to a statistical analysis carried out by the German National Tourist Board (DZT), the unprecedented growth in Germany’s tourist industry over the past year is due to an influx of visiting Americans. No one in the DZT, particularly the statisticians, quite knows why. Maybe it’s the beer and hospitality. Maybe it’s the richness of Germany’s culture and history. Maybe it’s the Autobahnen, perhaps the most fiendish and death-defying road system I have ever had the privilege to survive. It is easy to imagine an expression of delight on the face of the typical American tourist as he puts the pedal to the metal with a mind to educate the Germans in the ways of real driving, shortly before the same Germans return the edification by demonstrating the most efficient and tidy method of securing the scene of a high-speed collision.
Not to suggest that Americans are the only ones who make the mental switch from crazy to crazy-insane when they read the magic words “Welcome to Germany”. Not at all. The Germans themselves do it – and the French, and the Italians. As for the English, they are more reserved, though, it must be said, for the wrong reasons entirely. By way of illustration I flashed past one or two of my compatriots in the course of our flirtation with death and I was impressed to see the occupants cowering below the level of the window sill like frightened children, wondering when the nightmare was going to stop, wondering when the next Mercedes was going to flash by, forcing them to cradle the crockery and brace themselves for the inevitable sonic boom. I was sympathetic, though not entirely sympathetic because I was being driven by a native German who – surely – had a in-built sense of the mechanics of this insanity, since she looked entirely calm the whole way. I later discovered this was travel fatigue.
~
Two days before, I was minding my own business and thinking not even slightly of Germany; just dabbling in some research on sentence processing; just studenting and faffing, generally arsing about and drinking my way through the public houses of Exeter. Imagine my surprise when I receive an email from Britta Osthaus – a young German woman whose wont is to trudge the corridors of power in the School of Psychology and make click-click noises in the general direction of dogs and, no, I don’t know why – politely enquiring if anyone in the department was interested in accompanying her to Germany. The trip would last no more than four days.
Why did I say yes? Why did a non-German speaking, utterly inexperienced traveller like me possibly do such a thing? I barely knew Britta. We had shared accommodation during a research trip to an island in the Bristol Channel and each had found good company in the other, but we weren’t bestest buddies. I had never had more than the most casual conversation with her. We had spoken of the weather, of German-English relations, and the weather some more. All this would change dramatically, but why did I say yes right then?
Adventure.
Excitement.
These two things had already caused me to accept the invitation of Britta’s mother to her birthday bash in Germany later that same month. So why go twice? I suppose I was bored with England. When I was a child my parents owned a caravan, so all of our holidays (good ones, to be sure) were spent in England. Seen it, done it, got the English T-shirt. I had been abroad twice: once to Germany with my school, aged eleven; once more with some university friends to Majorca, aged twenty-one. The former I barely remember. The latter I remember in glorious technicolor, but we went to English-speaking clubs, got drunk, went to sleep, woke up in the afternoon, went to the beach, got ready for clubbing, and repeated the procedure again. We grew sunburned, emaciated and sleep-deprived.
So what if I did something daring? What if I did something spontaneous, threw myself in the deep end of the pool? Hobnobbed with strangers and made some friends, starting with Britta?
Wasting no time, I rose from my computer, checked the level of available underwear in my wardrobe (a depth of four inches – after some mental calculations I guessed it would be enough), checked the level of my finances (no calculations required here, not when you deal with so many zeroes) and sent an email which replied in the affirmative. All that remained was a quick call to Barclaycard to get my card authorised and, so doing, exhaust a whole day’s quota of simpering.
I spent one hot, restless night in the new house I shared with Almar and Catherine (we moved in the previous afternoon) and, on the fateful morning of the journey, my alarm – always as delicate as a butler’s cough – woke me as much through pain as sound. Part of me was grateful. I had been undergoing a thoroughly unpleasant dream in which my PhD supervisor was an evil headmaster berating me, a lazy schoolchild, for not doing enough work on my German verbs. I made a mental note to go easier on Freud in future discussions then poked out enough eye-snot to see the clock properly. It was five-thirty in the morning. And Sunday morning to boot. Somewhere deep in my brain, my ability to speak and my sense of humour were hiding from the light. I made it to the shower on will-power alone, whereupon I proceeded to burn then freeze my arm, actually have a shower, trip headlong getting out and finish the manoeuvre with the connection of chin on sink. It was the first time my mouth had closed since getting out of bed. I growled. An hour later Britta arrived in sickeningly good cheer and I did my best to convince her that the sneer on my face was a smile in disguise. “What a beautiful morning,” she said in her precise English, putting my bags in the car. “How are you?”
“Smashing.” It was raining already.
To indicate my discomfort I had thrust my hands in my pockets and frowned, a non-verbal cue to which Britta was quite oblivious. In Germany, as I was to discover later, they have a system whereby people who wish to complain about something actually do so. This is extraordinary, for in England we put our hands in our pockets, sigh deeply, and reply “Smashing” to questions about our state, smiling delicately all the while. Behind the smile we hope that through some supernatural process, perhaps telepathy, the other will pick up on our discomfort and do something nice about it. Needless to say this glossy veneer of politeness is not the most effective form of communication, though foreigners seem to find the whole thing rather charming. The upside to this is that everybody (more or less) is polite in England. If you trip and fall in a crowd, there will be someone to gather your possessions and help you to your feet. If you knock shoulders with another man in a pub, the other will produce a “Sorry, mate” with the speed of a gunslinger. If you crash your car and lie bleeding in the road, drivers will carefully avoid your stricken form just in case you have chosen to lie there, because they are too polite to interfere with someone else’s business. Occasionally one car will slow down, open a window and enquire as to your pathetic, bleeding condition: “Are you alright down there, mate?” The quintessential Englishman will reply, “Smashing,” and the car will drive on.
The journey to Salisbury was uneventful unless you count dreams. When we reached Stone Henge, that immense piece of architecture that had once stood in a clearing at the end of a long, forest road, Britta suggested I drive the Golf to London.
It was a left-hand drive car. I considered this carefully and estimated the risk of fatality at no more than forty per cent. What the Hell. Fair heart never won pensioner’s bus-pass.
“Just be careful.”
“Britta, don’t worry.”
“You’re about to reverse into that pram.”
“I’m fully in control. Just relax.” Quietly: “What pram?”
After several attempts at changing gear using the window lever we were underway, leaving the ancient site behind as the first rays of sun struck the top of the stones. At least, I assume they did. Much of my time was taken with reassuring Britta that, yes, I was aware that the car was close to the centre of the road and, yes, I could see the lorry behind us approaching at attack speed. For the most part, however, I should say that British drivers are very courteous to German-registered cars. Everyone gave me a wide birth. Perhaps this is due to the islander’s natural suspicion of foreigners. Or perhaps this is because those drivers who avoided us had flirted with death on the German Autobahnen, and were worried that our car would kick into high gear at a moment’s notice and be gone with a sonic boom.
Two: The Lost Continent
For reasons relating to sleep deprivation I remember very little about the Sea France ferry which carried us across the channel in such inimitable style. I do remember an ash tray in the toilet cubicle which gave me pause to think about the difference between French and English attitudes towards smoking, and a French chef who had clearly spent a great deal of time training to be mean and ugly. Which reminds me. In England we have a little-known but over-subscribed federation which claims retailers, tour operators, the police and, most importantly of all, teenage waitresses within its membership. I speak of none another than the Federation of Unnecessarily Rude Employees, or FURE, pronounced “fury” by its members. Said members hold the values of paucity, terror and over-pricing in high regard, and will, in the case of teenage waitresses, think nothing of snorting in response to a polite question concerning the menu or, in the case of old-age supermarket checkout girls, throw your wine after your eggs with a contemptuous flick of the wrist and a favour you with a look which roughly equates to: “I hope you’re happy that I have to sit here and smile, sit here passing the same old shit over the same little bleeper day after day and do you have a bloody reward card?”. Well, roughly. But you can imagine my delight when my short, terrifying and over-priced conversation with the surly chef heralded my acquaintance with the French chapter of FURE. I wondered idly, looking out over the long wake of the ferry as it slew across La Manche, whether the Germans had a similar federation.
We made landfall in Calais and adjusted our watches. Calais is a curious mixture of dockland, seagulls and large grey blocks of overnight accommodation. Even after two hours at sea it makes an ugly impact on the eye, but the ragged skyline of cranes and towers was the last vestige of the twentieth century industrialisation I would see until we reached Germany, so I looked hard. Until then it would be the vast reaches of flatness which constitute northern France, Belgium and finally the Netherlands, the latter so flat that any tree above a certain height is summarily butchered for its clog-bearing properties, liberal attitude or no liberal attitude. From the motorway, the Netherlands is ridiculously featureless save for the occasional farmhouse. And, even after close inspection and innumerable complaints to my guide, not a single windmill, dyke or clog. Not even a bloody tulip. Slightly put out, I hummed the tune to Vandervalk.
“How goes it, Frau Osthaus?” I asked.
“Hmm?” Britta said. I had interrupted her thoughts and she turned to me with a puzzled expression. Immediately the car also veered in my direction. Britta snapped her head forward and corrected the wheel. “Oopsah! That’s better. Sorry.”
Britta is an interesting mix of German and English culture. She confesses to feeling foreign in our country despite her command of the language and our customs. Like all Germans, she continually worries about being rude and domineering and, like all Germans, has very little to worry about, since rudeness is a quality which shines through language. Britta is an organiser. She packed the food for our journey properly and methodically. She drove the car according to a schedule. She spoke constantly of what-if scenarios. What if I got bored? What if I wanted to go home? What if my credit card didn’t work? Whatawhatawhat –
“What?”
“I said, how’s it going?”
“Oh, not too bad.”
Her English is essentially accentless. The listener thinks he can hear an accent, but this is a trick of Britta’s German prosody and articulation. Her pronunciation is almost too precise and lacks the delect corruption of an accent, without which she will never be mistaken for a native. I mention this because we spoke of it at length in the context of my own German ability which, in comparison with Britta’s use of English, is toweringly pathetic.
“Go,” I said to Britta.
“OK. Wie isset?” she asked. How is it?
“Muss, und selbst?” Fine, and yourself?
We had been repeating this sorry ritual for the previous ten hours and, somewhere near Antwerp, after about five hundred iterations, it was yet to sound comfortable. As I dozed fitfully somewhere near the border I felt that my last remaining hope in learning German lay in hypnotically-induced past life regression, though with my luck the nearest my immortal soul would have been to Germany is a greasy spoon in Grimsby, choking to death on a Frankfurter.
Not that I hadn’t tried. A month prior to my incursion I had seized the opportunity to undergo an intensive German language course. A crash course may be a more appropriate description, however, because crash is precisely what I did. After two weeks of instruction from a rather scary native German called Birgit I was fluent in a number of areas, providing those areas involved the purchasing of cheese, the asking of directions to the Bahnhof, and identifying famous German film stars from the silent era. I could also read the hands on a clock quicker than you can boil an egg. In my defence at the shortness of this list I should that say that it can be doubled with the inclusion of swearwords, and by the end of the two weeks I could also count to one hundred, though sadly not in German. In the event, one phrase which became the lynchpin of a number of drunken conversations by dint of its undeniable hilarity turned out to be “My clock is broken”. Not the most incapacitatingly funny statement in English, true, but the German version – Mein Wecker ist kaput – is extremely funny.
Honestly.
Three: The English Problem
On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, Britta and I arrived in Germany. It was hot and thundery. Both of us were suffering from travel fatigue and, perhaps, a little cabin fever. I was getting bored with Country music – though I already had a head start on that one – and Britta was getting bored with my constant complaints of Typist’s Arse from too much sitting. Mightily glad the journey was at an end, we arrived in Dortmund and located the small village of Bodelschwingh, where I was scheduled to sample the delights of the its annual festival, the Kirmes. I stumbled out of the Golf and straightened my back, groaning like an elderly bulb-picker rising after a day’s honest crouching. It felt marvellous.
When I opened my eyes Britta was gone. I looked up and down the village’s street, pleasant and strewn with cars, silent except for the occasional titter of a bird. It occurred to me that I was standing on foreign soil with nothing but a credit card, a cheery smile and a not inconsiderable knowledge of German silent-era film stars. I swallowed painfully. If Britta happened to, as it were, disappear. . .but there she was, in arms of her long-term boyfriend Max, whom I already knew from stories that would be impolite to repeat here. After a pause that I spent closely inspecting the top of my shoes, Max approached with a friendly smile and shook my hand. He escorted me to a little room that had a strange smell and very comfortable bed.
I had two hours to shower, collapse and sleep before the Kirmes.
~
It was a perfect evening. We were walking down a street teaming with life. The smell of toffee apples was in the air, not to mention hamburgers, sausages and diesel-powered generators. Amidst the roar of a thousand conversations I heard children laughing, adults laughing, and people riding fairground attractions with squeals of delight. I spied the owners of the rides: portly, sweaty men with pork-chop sideburns hailing above the din with the clarity of English newspaper touts.
“What are they saying?” I asked Britta.
“Something, maybe nothing. Perhaps they’re making it up.”
“Yeah, E’nin’ St’a’rd!”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
By this point we had been joined by Britta’s mother, Anne, a short, elfin lady, about to turn sixty, but with the mischievous eyes of an eighteen-year-old. She bounded from one person to next exhibiting an enthusiasm I would normally attribute to someone returning home after a long and perilous voyage. A thought occurred to me as I watched her talk to old friends in her soft German. I was an Ausländer, a foreigner, and an English one at that. What exactly did I think I was doing?
“Ian?”
“Hmm?”
“When you get lost,” Britta repeated, “ask for the Feuerwehrstand.”
“Oh yeah, no problem.”
On each side of the narrow street ran all manner of stalls. Some were selling toys, clothes and kitchen equipment. Others wanted you to throw darts at balloons, throw rings over the heads of milk bottles, or fish for little plastic ducks with numbers on the bottom. Roll up, roll up. There were coconut shies, raffles, stalls selling calendars full of old photographs, pre- and post-war, engaging monochromatic snapshots of Dortmund’s recent history. There were trailers selling hamburgers – “Those are real hamburgers, by the way,” Britta said, quiet and close, and I’m not sure if I cared for her tone – sausages, chips (with mayonnaise if it took your fancy) and fried, fragant mushrooms dripping with garlic. All this came in glimpses, since we were bulldozing through the crowd in an illegal rugby manoeuvre called a flying wedge.
“Wo ist der Feuerwehrstand?” I repeated, and it sounded, as it always does, too much like wooden Russian. I formulated my next question and considered asking it in German – to keep up the flow, and so on – before realising I couldn’t translate a bloody word of it. I gave up and reverted to English: “So remind me again what the ‘Foyervairschtand’ is.” I swerved to avoid the dropped shoulder of a capable-looking old gentleman, clearly a veteran of German crowds..
“Well. . .” Britta began. Only a trained observer would have been able to tell that this was perhaps the tenth time she had told me. “Well, most of the volunteer organisations in Bodelswingh have beer stalls – Stände ¬– at the festival. The Feuerwehrstand is the stall of the volunteer fire-fighters, the Freiwillige Feuerwehr. Just over there.” She pointed.
“Uh-huh.” I was listening to the whistle of the word’s meaning as it dropped out of my head when a passer-by caught me a glancing blow to the midriff. Now, having played the odd game of rugby during my teenage years, I am not inexperienced when it comes to concealing mild pain, if only to give the appearance of machismo in front of the blokes when, really, the appropriate course of action involves the adoption of the foetal position and continuous, vicious swearing – English, German, I’m not fussy – until the pain imp gets bored and leaves to bother someone else. In this instance, I walked on sporting a dead man’s rictus, still only mildly panicked when I realised that in order to take a breath I would have to bend almost double and risk falling under a sea of purposeful Germans. By the time we passed the Feuerwehrstand, whatever that was, my rapidly weakening body had decided on fainting as the best course of action, but then the cramp in my diaphragm abruptly subsided and I drew a few gulps of air in time for my meeting with the first representatives of Britta’s family. If they asked why I looked tired and blue I’d just shrug and, quick as a flash, tell them my clock was broken.
There is something rather comforting in being a foreigner, an Ausländer, or, if not exactly comforting, at least protective. It affords special status. You are exempt from worries about fitting into the group because you know that, in the event, you are cut from a different cloth, or you may think you are. You can sit in the corner and not speak to anybody, not bother to communicate and get quietly drunk. On the way home you can take solace in various notions which go nowhere near to touching the truth, which is that you have had an evening alone in the company of others. The truth is that you’ve been lazy and rude. On the ferry to Calais I had looked out over the wake of the ship and considered this issue carefully. We were only minutes out of Dover and, as Britta entertained some English schoolchildren behind me with the antics of her Wilde Matilde puppet, I made the decision to get my hands dirty. I would not sit in the corner and get quietly drunk. I would do some exploring of the culture through the vessels which give it life, German people, and possibly make a complete fool of myself.
Did I say possibly?
Crowded around the volleyball club’s beer stand were various characters from Britta’s immediate and extended family. Anne introduced me to each of them in turn (“Das ist mein junger englischer Freund”) and, as I shook hands over and over, I waited for the opportunity to produce some of my German phrases.
And waited.
And waited some more.
I tried to speak German. I tried really hard. But, damn them all, they spoke better English than what most English people do. Even when the sun went down and I was celebrating my previous beer with another beer, I was speaking fluently in the wrong language. It is still no consolation that, after so long in Germany, my English has vastly improved.
Four: ’Amburgers! Sausages! Dead Parrots!
Not being a fan of the show, I was mildly alarmed to discover that most German people are more familiar with Monty Python’s Flying Circus than they are with Dickens, Margaret Thatcher and the remainder of the (albeit somewhat suspect) cultural jewels Britain has bestowed upon the world. That first night I spoke to a good many German gentlemen who would come out with a line from (say) the dead parrot sketch and look at me with some anticipation because I – being of English blood, sound mind and, QED, honorary standard bearer of our world perspective – was expected to return serve with the next line. On most occasions they received nothing more than a Polite Smile. On other occasions I would pretend to tie my shoelaces and crawl away under cover of people and darkness. Fortunately for Anglo-German relations, my chats were deepened by (a) the need to talk about something sodding else than Monty Python and (b) the steady but serious on-line pickling of my brain. The cause of (b) seemed to be correlated with deliciously cool Dortmund beer, the latter opening myriad conversational possibilities which hadn’t quite occurred to me previously. Before drowning my wits completely a young German man called Michael was kind enough to show Britta and myself into the building behind the Feuerwehrstand, and the secret of beer’s near-infinite supply.
“Ooh, what’s in here then?”
“You’ll see.”
The building was old. It was constructed of long timber beams and irregular granite stones and had probably seen over three hundred years’ service protecting the village from fire. In the centre of the main chamber – where, I supposed, one would normally expect a fire-engine – was a tank containing several hundred litres of Dortmund’s finest, with a pipe going through the floor (a purpose-built tunnel) to the Stand outside. In Dortmund they take their beer very seriously. As we returned to the night air, I mused over what would happen if the supply were to run dry. Doubtless the individual or individuals responsible would soon find themselves passed on, kaput, a dead parrot.
~
After a moment’s silence Britta asked me, “Do you want to go on the Jump Street?” And then, seeing my expression, “It’s like a big fairground ride.”
This sounded bad. I looked at Max. “Are you going to go on it?”
“Of course.” This sounded better.
I returned to Britta. “Are you going to go on it?”
She laughed and favoured me with a look which suggested I was proposing something clearly idiotic. “No way.”
“Uh-huh.” Things were sounding bad again.
“No, it’s fine,” Max said. “It’s good fun.” To emphasise the point, he took a long drag on his cigarette and blew out a cloud of acrid smoke. When we emerged on the far side, there it was.
I do not know who (or what) invented the Jump Street. But I would bet my weight in pumpernickel that he or she (or it) had mental problems beyond the dreams of Freud. To explain, the Jump Street is a simple machine in the tradition of the wheel, the hangman’s noose and the assassin’s blade. Imagine a great flat wall two storeys high. There are two even greater arms on the surface of this wall, connecting to it at the same height, being the same length, and moving at the same speed. The end of each arm connects again to each end of a long platform, which can be swung in a large circle, remaining level throughout, and upon this platform are roughly two dozen hapless Germans and the occasional Englishman who lacks enough common sense to avoid such things. To this mixture add one German operator, who is not just insane but crazy-insane, and supply some power.
“Come on, Britta, it doesn’t look so bad,” I scoffed. Unbeknownst to me, the Starship Hocking had just gone to Irony Factor Four.
Britta smiled and took my beer.
“Go on then, get on.”
I inflated my chest. “I will.”
I realised something was amiss when the metal bar which slid down over everybody’s lap stopped about ten centimetres above my thighs. I looked at Max. Max looked at me. There was an aspect to his expression I normally associate with escaped mental patients or those who are observing me to see if I’ve got the joke. Well, the punchline hit me around the third revolution of the platform. The operator – obviously bored and perhaps unaware of the findings of research into G-forces and their effect on the mammalian brain – cranked up the juice to a level which, on his dial, probably came with a label reading “Attention: Minimum Safe Distance One Kilometre”.
Going up was fine. Reaching apogee was fine. Coming down. . .being lifted out of the seat. . . knowing that one good sneeze would dislodge my body just enough to send it over that puny and faintly ridiculous safety bar. . .expanding my arms and legs left and right in a desperate effort to gain purchase. . .looking across to see Max’s hysterical face, getting more hysterical the more he looked at mine. . .that was not fine. That was bordering on unfine.
After five minutes of this torture the platform slid to a halt. I was mildly surprised to be disembarking at the same place I got on, rather than a field about a mile away, and even more surprised to discover – patting my clothes in various places – that I had retained control of my bodily functions. I gripped the stair rail with the grim mettle of an astronaut emerging from his capsule after days in space and looked around for Britta. She came over.
“Your beer.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you OK? You looked like you weren’t enjoying it.”
I bit my sleeve to stem a tide of hysterical laughter, then, when the feeling passed, attempted to explain my reflections on the experience. She was unimpressed. We eventually meandered back to the Feuerwehrstand as the Kirmes wound down: most people had left. Lights were vanishing and the air rang with the clang of metal on metal as the rides and stalls were closed. When we turned the corner back onto the main street I threw a final, hateful glance in the direction of the Jump Street’s reckless operator. He caught my look and winked.
I had half a mind to frisk him for a FURE membership card.
Part Two: Encore
Five: Sometimes They Come Back
Becky and Jane sat opposite myself and Edward. We sat wearing the expressions of bereaved relatives. Silence: not awkward, but not comfortable either. I’d had no sleep and my mind was tripping over its own feet – I saw bizarre metaphors in the most banal, everyday things. The universe had tilted. We had driven from Exeter to London barely two hours before and it was around six in the morning. Already, the sun shone hellishly in the sky and my eyes hurt. To protect them from the sunlight, I’d spent most of the trip to the airport wearing a pair of ridiculously expensive sunglasses. I felt like a vampire and looked, worse, like a tourist.
In the café, we sat at a nondescript table in a sea of nondescript tables. Airport culture. I guessed that for most of them, getting to Heathrow had been the most stressful part of their voyage, and was mercifully complete. When travelling on the ground (especially a motorway) you are surrounded by poorly trained amateurs, but in the sky you are dealing with professionals. From this point it was plain sailing.
Some people sat alone staring into hot drinks with such fascination that I checked mine, just to be sure; some sat mindlessly biting their nails, wondering when their expected partner would arrive, or perhaps wondering whether a recently departed partner would ever come back; others, typically teenagers unaccompanied by their parents for the first time, shifted restlessly and laughed at the slightest spin on a word. In the enclosed space of the café these teenagers provided the only break from the constant, stultifying static of background conversation. They chattered like Furbies, in English but unintelligible, and were dressed like Barbie dolls. They giggled as one then quickly hushed for the sake of politeness, which seemed to titilate them even more.
We sighed, the four of us, as one. I blinked at the table and noticed a croissant had appeared. The coffee first, or the croissant? Trivial decisions required the most serious thoughts.
“I can’t believe how much this coffee was,” I said, stirring listlessly. Somewhere below, down on the main floor of the terminal where the tanoy held court, a hopelessly computerised voice announced a delayed flight with a rather human degree of smugness.
“I know,” replied Edward. “I paid for it.”
Edward had driven us to the airport and hadn’t even had the benefit of a few minutes’ sleep in the car. His eyes were hooded and sombre. I looked at him and offered a toothy grin. At that moment Edward was twenty-two years old. We had met in a sandpit at a kindergarten in Cornwall when I was about two feet long, so I’ve known him for eighteen of those years. I’ve seem him in every situation you can think of: the time he cried for his mother, for which I took the piss for about a year; when he, as ten-year-old child, stood fast between his younger brother, James, who has Downes Syndrome, and a group of older boys, who had time to kill; when we both got drunk for the first time; when we carried the coffin of a mutual friend the last few yards. Kid’s culture. Edward had just completed a degree in pharmacology and physiology from Southampton and was en route to a coveted PhD position in Oxford when I phoned him.
“Edward,” I had said. The phone was crackly and I’d had to shout. “Alright, mate?”
“Not too bad, mate. Yourself?”
We hadn’t spoken for nearly three months. Hadn’t needed to.
“On the up. Want to come to Germany? We’ll fly. Costya about a hundred.”
Pause.
“Never flown before. Shit-scared of heights is the problem. Put me down for one. Non-smoking.”
Now Edward was sitting next to me in Heathrow airport desperately drinking coffee and, probably, suffering from a severe case of nerves. He was travelling to Germany with two people he didn’t know in order to see about a thousand people he didn’t know. Not to mention Edward’s height problem. He didn’t show these concerns openly. But I still knew they were there.
The gaggle of teenagers were laughing again. I threw a testy look in their direction.
“Bloody hell, I’m tired,” Edward mumbled, downcast. I wondered if he could read the future in the swirling islands in his cappucino.
“I hear you.”
My comment hung in the air for a long moment.
Kid’s culture.
Long fingers tapped the business end of a cigarette into an ashtray. The owner of the fingers sat back and took another drag. Then she blew the smoke over her shoulder and took on the curious, familiar pose of the stylish smoker: slender, twisted and aesthetic. Take away the cigarette and you are left with a human statue, the artist in repose. This particular artist is Jane Banfield, mid-twenties, another psychologist from Exeter by way of Wales and, before that, Kent. That summer was the second year of her PhD and she had no business going to Germany. Just like all of us. Too much to do and not enough time to do it. But she ignored this and decided to come along for a good time. Student culture. Her plan was to stay briefly with Britta and then see her friend (and ours) Sabine Pahl, who lived in Bremen.
Jane caught my eye and smiled. I was grateful. She didn’t have to make the effort; nobody wanted to smile. We wanted to sleep and wake up ready to face the day. But it was too late; this day had already started without us. I contorted my mouth experimentally in a few directions and settled on something like a grin.
“Still smiling?” she asked.
“Seems so.”
“How long have we got?” Edward asked.
Jane glanced at her watch and looked pained. “Ten minutes?”
“Oh, maaaaarvelous,” he said. He tried to bolt his coffee and burned his mouth.
As Jane and Edward continued their conversation I reflected once more on the happy circumstance that we were fitting together. Jane, Becky and I were good friends; Edward knew only me. Luckily he has a socialite’s expertise at making friends quickly and a normal person’s expertise at keeping them. He revels in the mystique of the stranger and knows which card to play when it is required. Wise-guy or new man – he knows.
“How are you doing over there, Becky?” I asked.
“Oh fine.”
Becky was stressed when Edward and I arrived to collect her. It had a lot to do with locking her house – shared with Britta – and ensuring that nothing major had been left turned on or wide open. Becky can do that. She flaps and she knows it.
“This is probably really stupid,” she’d said, standing in the dark hallway, “but could somebody go upstairs and check the windows for me?"
“I’ll do it,” Edward piped. Moments later he returned and ushered her to the car.
Becky’s stuff was safely in the boot and we were about to drive off. Then she paused in front of the car’s open door and said, “I’ll just check the bathroom one more time. . .”
I looked at Edward. He looked at me. We jumped out and intercepted Becky just as she was about to open the front door. We bundled her into the back of the car, jumped back in and drove off into the night with a squeal of tyres.
“I wonder what the weather’s like in Germany right now?”
“It’s probably pissing down,” she replied.
“Language.”
“Sorry, Ian. I’m sure it’s a beautiful day and the birds are singing in the trees.”
I laughed and an answering smile broke through on Becky’s face. Becky, like Jane, is a tall girl, but with an athlete’s build around the chest and shoulders. Those shoulders have probably made the difference between winning and losing in her competitive rowing. As has her (rather incongruous) competitive attitude, applied to everything from her psychological research to wood-chopping, the latter particularly scary when she gets going with the sledge-hammer and wedges. Becky is collection of opposites – hard and soft, relaxed and acerbic – wrapped up in a quiet, intelligent mind.
We sat chatting for a while over coffee and croissants in continental fashion. Time passed. The gradual in-and-out of the clientele marked a change in their character. The teenage Furbies were gone, replaced by excruciatingly touristy Englishmen wearing shorts, sandals and loud holiday shirts, followed by teams of children who needed repeated smacking from their parents to keep them crying. Coffee was consumed by this seething mass as fast as it could be made. Down below, the computer tanoy muttered something about our flight. At last, we trudged towards the gate like happy campers. The sky was waiting.
Back on the table, Edward’s cappuccino continued to swirl. I had wondered about seeing the future in those creamy swirls, but only with my usual irony. Walking towards the gate, I realised, in all seriousness, that telling the future was laughable anyway. The future was shaped like an airplane. After that, it would be shaped like a mass of land called mainland Europe, and then the future would be new people and good times. Deutsche Kultur.
~
“This pilot,” I said, gripping the armrests on my ridiculously small seat as though I could hold the aeroplane steady myself, “is absolutely, positively, taking the bloody piss.”
Edward looked at me with a half-grin and tried to look calm, but I could tell that behind his apparently relaxed expression lay a niggling fear for his life. For my part, I felt mildly guilty that this was the first time Edward had flown and, quite possibly, the last. I suppose the truth was that the bumps were playful low-level eddies, but it was much easier to imagine the pilot looking across at his first officer with a grin and a wink as he yanked the control column to and fro, up and down, hither and thither and thither some more. In an effort to calm down I concentrated on sucking the boiled sweet in my mouth. It didn’t help.
Against all the odds, we survived, and Britta – whom, as I write, has been nominated to receive the MBE for services to English tourists – met us at the airport sporting a smile which was far too dazzling for someone in so light-sensitive a state as myself, but I was reserved enough to simply wear my sunglasses and thrust my hands into my pockets. We clambered into Max’s dragon-like Citroen after a short but bitter search for the blessed thing, stories flying around that it had mischievously driven itself to another parking space.
With Britta at the helm we left the airport for the Autobahn and thence to Dortmund. The temperature inside the car reached a level where spontaneous combustion became a very real possibility (sleep an impossibility) and conversation was reduced to sweaty grunts and the occasional expletive. Two hours later and two kilos lighter we stumbled out of the car near the entrance to our accommodation, a rather luxurious flat located in the grounds of Schloss Bodelschwingh.
I put two fists into my lower back and pushed hard enough to hear a gentle creak. As usual, it felt marvellous. When I opened my eyes I was rewarded by the sight of the sun shining in a cloudless sky. The wind seethed through the trees and the birds – who always know their place in such a scene – sang with the requisite tranquillity. Once again I looked across the quadrangle of lawn which separated the flats from the impressively German façade of the schloss and breathed very, very deeply. Something in my head akin to a mental camera flash captured the image and then, just as quickly, the moment was gone.
“Ian,” Britta asked, “do you’ve got a sleeping bag?”
“Yessum, in the boot. The orange bag. No, that one.” I sniffed. “Nice place, Britta. Let’s go have a look inside. . .”
We wandered into the building, checked out the rooms and, looking through the window of Becky’s room at a bird’s-eye view of the grounds, I stifled a yawn.
“Bored already?” Becky asked.
“Aah-rah-yah,” I replied, and waited for my mouth to close. Moments later, still waiting, I made a check that it hadn’t dislocated and then shuffled to my room like a drunken lord after a night on the razzle. I collapsed face-first onto the mattress, whack, and fell asleep, my slumber gently ushered by the insistent whispers of a mild concussion.
~
That night we ate a barbeque in front of the apartment building. Anne, Britta’s mother, and Haldis, a neighbour, were kind enough to provide beer and food while Edward and I set about grunting noisily and sucking air through our teeth – all because of the barbeque, which seemed to be out to get us. I burned my hand. Edward burned the meat. Eventually Anne showed us what to do and put an end to our double-act. The food (in spite of Edward) was gorgeous in the cool evening air and a marvellous way to relax after the day’s travelling. I had never realised that sitting down could be so exhausting – only suspected.
We were supping wine and toasting our hostesses like proppa English gentlemin when the sound of a dragon stirred the trees. I peered into the darkness and gestured with my glass.
“Hark, for methinks I hear Max’s car.”
“Nagarajan?” asked Edward.
“Most likely.”
We had been waiting for a long time for Nagarajan to arrive. He had taken a later flight than ours. Britta and Max had driven to the airport to collect him and now, much hyped, he was here. I was dying to introduce him to Edward. The car’s engine cut out and a short, plump figure entered our circle of light with one arm held aloft, and Nagarajan shouted a word that can only be described as “Haallllllooooooooooo!”
R Nagarajan hails from one of the southernmost states in India. He has more degrees than a fahrenheit thermometer and modesty and humility in such quantity that he will bubble over with gratitude at the slightest show of kindness, a gesture he will repay with interest. Nagarajan does not drink to speak of, speaks in gloriously personalised idioms, and counts all the strangers he meets as his friends. One suspects he counts all those strangers he hasn’t met as friends too. If so, they’d better watch out. He is permanently seconds away from laughter, a laughter so contagious that it is surely is just a matter of time before one of his helpless targets – possibly a visiting professor or a world-authority on oystercatchers – actually dies laughing. Several have already been hospitalised.
“My very good friends,” he called, roaring with delight. “How are yoooouuuuu!”
I rose and grasped his outstretched hand.
“Ian, my most special friend!”
“Alright, mate?”
“I am bit tired, but it is alriiiight.”
Naj worked the crowd like a politician. He already knew Anne from long ago and had been happy to come to her birthday party, though this meant a break from his PhD studies. That summer he was researching oystercatcher behaviour from a base in the School of Psychology. He was a welcome edition to our Little England, particularly because Jane had left for Bremen earlier in the day to spend time with Sabine.
“Nagarajan, this is Edward.”
“I am pleased to meet you,” said the former.
“Alright, mate?” said the latter.
“OK, Mike.”
“No, my name’s Ed.”
“Mike, yes.”
Nagarajan refered to Edward as Mike for the rest of the holiday. The former is not unaware of The Continuity Joke.
~
The next day we decided on a course of action which involved a trip to Cologne. I don’t remember why. Sometime on the train, somewhere twix’d here and there, Nagarajan said something I couldn’t hear. I had barely woken from a nap and smiled a hello. He kept looking at me, his head lolling back and forth with the carriage as we pulled away from the station. The bump-bump reminded me of a line from an old poem. I repeated it over and over until the words blended with the bump-bump, bump-bump, and felt the pull of sleep.
“Ian?”
“Yes, Nagarajan?” I asked dreamily.
“Very very hot. I am thinking of India now.”
“Hmm, we’re both far from home.”
I rubbed my eyes, cracked my knuckles and took in the scenery. It looked disappointingly like England. The compartment was humid and all of us – me, Naj, Becky and Edward – were sweating in a happy, touristy way. Britta was staying behind for a well-deserved break in which to do all the real work our visit had stopped her from doing. I thought of Dortmund and closed my eyes. The world flickered black and red as we followed the sun through the trees.
“My very good friend Ian, you must come to India one time.”
I blinked awake and smiled. No sleep for a while; Nagarajan wanted to talk. “So tell me about the fierce creatures, Naj. Still got tigers?”
“Aaaaaaaaah,” he mused, and you could almost hear the clockwork in his head, “one time, friend of mine asked if I want to go see a tiger. Student friend. It is near where I live back home, near big forest, really really big. Friend is saying there is a path in the middle of the forest. Tiger walks through same-same place every night.”
“Really?”
“Oh yaaaaah. One night we sit just a few metres from this path. Soon tiger comes. You must be very still you see. If tiger is not smelling you, still it has very good eyes. Friend says if tiger is smelling or seeing you, jump into river. Tiger cannot swim, you see.”
Naj looked at the rushing countryside and stifled a laugh.
“We saw the tiger. It was very nice. Some time later I am speaking to another friend and I tell him same story about tiger. He looks at me.” Naj paused and feigned surprise. “‘Surely you did not sit when a tiger was walking past you?’ he asked. ‘Yaaah,’ I said, ‘we were near a river. As long you head for river if tiger is chasing you it is alright. Tiger cannot swim. ’ ‘Aaaah,’ he said, ‘you may know that, student friend may know that, but tiger’ –” Naj sniggered and slapped his thighs “–‘tiger is not knowing that!’”
“Whoa,” I said. Nagarajan has a way of communicating through sheer enthusiasm that puts the most gifted orators to shame. “I have to come now.”
Naj wobbled his head in a half-nod, half-shake. “Yaaah. But ultimately, it is problem with the elephants you see. They don’t like people. More dangerous than tigers.”
“Really?” The thought was intriguing.
“Oh dear,” Naj said, giggling delightfully. “They are not liking us at all. They play with humans, you see. Elephants are running much, much faster than a man and are smelling you many miles away. When elephant wants to kill you there is no escape!”
“Ah,” I replied, slightly bewildered that Naj found the whole thing hysterical.
“Mmmmm,” came the contemplative murmur when he had calmed somewhat. “One time another student friend of mine, he found himself being chased by the elephant, you see. He –” Naj became racked with laughter, so much so that I found myself laughing too – “was chasing him for many hours and to escape my friend climbed up a tree.”
“Wow,” I said, echoing the thoughts of Edward and Becky, who were listening avidly. Being a student friend of Naj’s was, apparently, quite a dangerous occupation. “What happened next?”
“So,” he continued, still at the mercy of a recurring giggle, “he was not realising that elephant can knock down tree!” Then he burst into laughter so thunderous I shielded my eyes in case the buttons popped off his shirt. Opposite us, Becky and Edward were wetting themselves. Some passengers had turned in our direction and regarded Naj with quizzical expressions.
I picked the tears from the corner of my eyes and, when the moment became quiet, said, “He got away?”
Nagarajan folded his arms and peered off into the distance with a contented smile and tried not to giggle.
“Ultimately, he was killed. Oh dear.”
“Ah. . .” I said, the smile frozen on my face. “Oh dear.”
~
A mere stone’s throw from Dortmund is the small but picturesque village of Bodelschwingh. I cannot relate a single jot of its development unless you count the building of its church about seven-hundred years ago (the event begot the yearly festival, the Kirmes) and a half-remembered tour of a very old cemetery, as improvised by a German chap called Mathias after I bumped into him whilst walking in the woods. The cemetery in question is circular and put me in mind of King’s Pet Sematary, though I did my best to concentrate on more historical matters as Mathias related the lineage of aristocrats (this is not a resting place for commonfolk, at least not originally) from the original baron to his current descendant. I was taken aback when he told me that the baron no longer lives in Bodelschwingh’s schloss. Apparently it gets very dark and cold in there.
In the centre of the cemetery is a large dais sheltered by a wooden structure, glistening with ivy and weed. Only a few feet below, in a vault, rest the bones of the Baron’s predecessors. Mathias walked into the centre with his dog, Max. He kicked away some leaves to reveal an inscription relating to the present occupants and read it aloud without translation. Perhaps he momentarily forgot I don’t speak German. But I remained outside and ignorant; there was no way I would step onto the dais to look at the lettering. It seemed rude.
“If it’s a crypt,” I asked thoughtfully, “how do you get in?”
Mathias stirred from his reverie.
“Why don’t you knock?” he said with a smile. “You’re standing on the entrance.”
I looked down and, sure enough, the ramp was not a ramp but a pair of huge, sloping doors. There was a ring in each that I could imagine being hooked to the harness of a team of horses for the funeral of the last aristocrat to be buried here, centuries ago. As I stepped off there came a sound from behind the doors, probably some stonework coming loose and rattling along the floor inside. It sounded like a rock thrown down an old well.
“Anyway,” Mathias said cheerfully, leading Max (who looked grateful in a doggy kind of way) out of the cemetery to resume the walk he had so generously interrupted for me. “See you back at the schloss?”
“Yeeees.”
I nodded respectfully at the crypt and the gravestones and left to continue my walk. Only later could I hear the birds once more.
~
Becky walked past wearing a bathing suit. She waved. I was standing with Britta alongside the low wall which protected onlookers from the lake of the schloss. The home of Bodelschwingh’s aristocrats is a piece of Westphalian arhictecture both spectacular and understated. It rises six storeys from the centre of a small lake and is supported by an underwater latticework of oaken stakes and beams. A sturdy bridge connects it to the shore and would have given the ancient barons a clear shot at any unwelcome intruders. Where the weeds grew sparse and the lilies parted, I could see sunshine sparkling on the surface of the lake. The atmosphere was ancient and serious.
“You coming in then?” Britta asked.
“I’d rather not.”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why?” added Edward.
“. . .dontlikeswimming,” I mumbled.
“Don’t like swimming?”
“Edward, are we going to have one of those repeat-everything-I-say moments?”
“Yes.”
“How about a skull fracture then?”
“Ooh, aren’t we touchy today?”
I smiled in a way that was clearly not a smile.
Some wit had left a surf board in the schloss’s moat, which seemed odd to me since surf was the last thing you’d expect to see in the middle of a lake in Germany. Not so algae, and lilies, and skin-blistering minerals. . .and fiendish, flesh-eating, diabolically cunning thingies – creatures that’d think nothing of gobbling one of your arms so sneakily that the first sign would be a gentle listing to the left or the right, depending on your amputation.
I was not going in.
“Take some pictures?” Britta asked, thrusting a camera into my hand. It looked big and expensive. I hefted it and guessed it would make a satisfying plunk! on contact with the water.
“Why yes.”
Over the next half-hour I clicked away and recorded for posterity – poor, put-upon posterity – various images of Edward toppling forwards in graceful splendour a split-second before giving the moat a full-frontal body slap; numerous snaps of Becky, giggling constantly, balanced precariously atop the surf board knowing that, as sure as eggs are eggs, gravity would reach up with its watery fingers and make a decisive grab for her, and it didn’t really matter how much she flapped her arms, she was never going to fly herself upright; Nagarajan mastering the board in unparalleled glory with the canny, kung fu-esque stance of the professional surfer; Britta, falling from every conceivable angle onto every conceivable body part and then getting up to do it again.
“Ian,” Edward shouted. “Are you coming in?”
“I’m sun bathing.”
“You bloody ponse.”
“You bloody ponse.”
“Plagiarist.”
“Sue me.”
Britta emerged from the cloudy depths and began to dry herself with a towel.
“Got any good pictures?”
“Yeah, they’ll look great,” I said from behind my grotesque best seller, waving it dismissively in the direction of her camera. Britta looked around and took in the scene. She sniffed noisily.
“Aren’t we lucky?”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yep, we are.”
“So lucky.”
“Britta?”
“Ymm?”
“Thank-you.”
“Bitte.”
~
Someone – and I’m not saying who, though her name might rhyme with banana fritter – decided that we should cycle to a Biergarten for a spot of food and, perhaps, some beer. Upon hearing this news at the end of an exhausting afternoon’s lounging, the group tried to appear enthusiastic. Edward even went as far as to change his underwear, lest a German driver took a physical dislike to him. I was quite excited by the whole thing, probably because I hadn’t been to the gym in a few days and was aching for some form of exercise. Thus I wasted no time in grabbing the best bike, a bike which, if it had been a dog, would have been the leanest, meanest, dribbliest and downright snarliest Doberman this side of the Danube. The bike was weathered and leathery; you could believe it had been up and down mountains and, when working to a deadline, straight through the middle of several. It was oiled. It was ready. It was, in short, going to be my bloody bike, and I took it with a whoop of joy.
Several other bicycles had been left in the yard outside the flats. There was one with a shopping basket on the front, one with a baby basket on the back, another real bone-shaker, and several others which defy any word other than “rickety”. I spent my time doing figures-of-eight around them until my companions began to turn up and take their own bikes (usually with a groan). I couldn’t help but grin and boast about nabbing the best one.
“Nice bike ya got there, Edward.” I added, “Not as nice as mine though.”
“How about a skull fracture?”
“Plagiarist!”
“Bike-poacher!”
While we were bickering, Becky put on a show for everybody by folding the bottom of her dress into a kind of nappy. Eventually the arrangement held, so she plonked herself triumphantly on her saddle and announced that she wouldn’t get up again until we reached the Biergarten.
“Becky,” Britta said, “do you know you’ve got to pedal backwards to brake on that bike?”
“Y’what, kid?”
“Pedal backwards.”
“Oh, roight.”
“There aren’t any handle brakes.”
“OK then.”
“So if you want to brake –”
“– I have to pedal backwards?”
Becky looked half-amused and Britta laughed.
“Shall we go?” Britta asked.
By this time Max had joined the group on his nifty drop-handlebar racer – not as nifty as my bike, but nifty nonetheless – and so we wobbled and careered our way out of the grounds. Soon we were cycling at dangerously high speeds on the wrong side of the road and having a high old time of it.
~
We stopped at a T-junction about five minutes later.
Most of us, that is.
Giving a little shriek of surprise Becky sped on, across the lane of a main road, coming to a halt somewhere on the other side thanks to the application of her feet on the tarmac. Think of Road Runner skidding to a stop amidst clouds of dust. The rest of us cringed and waited for the inevitable impact of car-on-Becky, but when none came, we gaped as Becky trundled back to safety wearing a sheepish expression. I was dumbfounded. Edward was petrified. Naj was giggling. Britta was furious. The last understandably so, since a person in her charge had just missed vehicular dismemberment by nought more than a chuffing whisker. . .so Britta repeated her message about the brakes (“Pedal backwards, you have to pedal backwards”) again and again until poor Becky was ready to rush out into the road for a second time, just to end it all.
We made it to the Biergarten with Becky intact. I was famished and ate a fantastic amount of Bratwürste which made me ill. Becky didn’t eat a single Bratwurst but was ill anyway, principally because of her copious consumption of beer. We all danced along to Mambo #5 and, for our amusement, took pictures of Nagarajan, who, for his own amusement, managed to look totally drunk in each (paradoxically, he ordered nothing but soft-drinks all night). Just when I thought I’d had enough of Mambo #5 – and when you’re tired of that song you’re tired of life – somebody tapped my shoulder and announced that it was time to go home. I nodded gratefully. We wandered outside and regarded the bikes. I wondered how much a large taxi would cost.
I was drunk and in no state to walk, let alone ride a bike. All the more idiotic, then, that I insisted on taking Becky’s evil, pedal-braking (not to say neck-breaking) bike, as we had agreed some hours before. We cycled away from the Biergarten down a pitch-black lane busy with people leaving the establishment; people who did not wish to be harrassed by an invasion of noisy cyclists. Despite a full knowledge of this, I cycled faster and faster, shouting, “Achtung! I’m English and I’m drunk, move aside,” or “Make way, people, I can’t control this thing,” or just “Gangway!” which I’m sure is English vernacular obscure enough to receive the award of Most Useless Warning Ever Given From A Bike.
A good time was had by all. Edward and I stopped no more than twenty times to up the fertility of the local flora, Naj found lots of things to giggle at, Britta supervised the more drunk amongst us, and Becky survived the trip home with barely a scratch and lived to quote The Fast Show another day. Which was nice.
~
Time accelerated, gathered speed like a runaway train. Anne’s party was as spectacular as promised. We drank our way through enough beer to fill a small swimming pool and danced disco foxtrots until the dusty floor of the barn had caked us from head to toe. I spoke to Britta’s uncle, Dieter, and his wife, Wilhelmina. Our conversation consisted of a greeting followed by a silence which neither of us could fill with understandable words, so we filled it with laughter. The same could be said for an hour-long chat with Harald, Britta’s childhood friend from East Berlin. One hour’s normal conversation for adult speakers of English will cover nearly ten-thousand words on each side. We used our hour to arrive at the simple conclusion that Harald was a bus-driver – but our mimes, noises and head-scratching were so convoluted and revealing that I’d make the claim that I know Harald pretty well, despite communicating no more than two words to him. Hatti was there too. He is the lead singer in a rock band whose title is Rausgeschmissen’ Geld – Wasted Money. I explained to him that Britta had played some of his songs in the car to help me learn German and, for his delectation, sang him the chorus of a particularly good one, which, sadly, I no longer remember. He left the party after that.
“Are you alright, our kid?” Becky asked, perched on the end of a picnic table in the barn. Naj was on the dance floor terrifying some children with a home-made dance routine. Edward was chatting up a bird.
“Muss, und selbst?”
“Turned German, have you?”
I looked around at the people I knew, people who had been kind to an Ausländer. Some I could name, countless others I could not. Our DJ, Britta, put on another CD and Mambo #5 shook the air. The evening stretched ahead of us.
“A little bit I hope. Want to dance?”
“Let’s go.”
