13thWR

ENCOUNTERS

By

Tom Walen

With a start, I leapt from my seat and at the same time a woman, surely no older than eighteen, stood in the doorway. "Is this compartment reserved?" she asked. "No," I said, "this isn't my compartment. I've made a mistake, or else someone has played a trick on me, for I never ride first class; I can't afford it. How can anyone? Yes, you may have it all, and all to yourself. This is a long journey; I never expected I could stay in a first class compartment for the duration, but since the conductor has already passed, you can stay whether your ticket allows it or not. I did not intend on staying, did not realize until a moment before you entered that I had wandered into a car where I do not belong. Does anyone? The ICE is already too expensive even for those of us who have a Bahncard," I said, "but I had no choice."

I realized that what I was saying to the young woman wasn't making complete sense, so in order to clarify what I meant, I said, "I had no choice; I could not wait. Berlin had become too much for me. When I looked out me window I could see the nuclear reactor there, right in the heart of former West Berlin. Every time I went downtown, every time I was in the zoo or the park or the KaDeWe, every time I perused the fish on display on floor five or read the titles of the new books in the windows of the stores, I knew I could not stay any longer in Berlin. History," I said, "in this city, suck the marrow from the air itself. History isn't a lie, but it is a devourer of well-being. No one in Berlin is well. Before the wall came down, it wasn't any better - if anything it was worse. But I have seen rats in the Egyptian Museum. I have seen them at night scurry up the construction cranes on Unter den Linden. My mind could not take it. A wrong move on the subway and I'd find myself wandering into areas of the city I did not know existed. A man with one leg riding a bicycle stopped me and asked for directions. He wore a dark gray overcoat at the bottom of which his one leg poked out. He had a tennis shoe on his foot. 'You're asking me for directions?" I said. 'But, Herr Fahrradfahrar, I don't know myself where I am. These streets I've never seen before. No trees, no advertising pillars, no kiosks, no signs anywhere to tell me where I am or how to get back to the subway. What can I do but tell you I do not know, myself, where I am and that I can offer you no assistance, no aid of any kind. Sir,' I said, 'I bid you good evening.' For days I could think of nothing but this man's shoe, his single tennis shoe, unlaced, dirty, that he wore on his one foot. Nothing but this shoe came to mind when I lay on my mattress in my room on Gutstrasse. This old shoe with red drops on its tip, as if someone had dripped fingernail polish on it.

"I am," I told the young woman standing on the threshold of the compartment, "not an unreasonable man. I do not consider myself high-strung or irrational, but in no sense could I make sense of this man's unlaced tennis shoe, and I regretted, and regret even now, not asking him to explain why he wore that particular shoe on his one remaining foot. But in no way can I say that this alone impelled me to leave Berlin. For days I wandered to and fro across the floor of my apartment, looked out my window at the nuclear plant near the stadium, to an fro I walked, haunted by the old man and other encounters. My days were taken up with plans to avoid such encounters as I had had with the old man with one leg, but always my plans were no use, always my plans were so much shit, so much uselessness and futility, so much waste, wasts and shit, over and over when I arrived in the evening back in my room I'd say to myself, Waste and shit, waste and shit, over and over as I paced to and fro, haunted by the man's foot or the woman's smile or the child without a tongue or the girl with the eighteen ear-and-nose-and-lip-rings on the tram home, or the old man who sang to himself songs from the past we should never have had, or the woman with a tumor on her left cheek, or the woman whose makeup was too thick, a wall on her face, I thought, she wears a wall on her face, and who of us is willing to break it - all these and others came back to me in my room as I looked at the nuclear power plant outside my window and wondered what it, this bulb, this mushroom, this abomination was doing in the heart of the city, what was it doing to the soul of the city and its inhabitants? Madness, I thought to myself, as I passed to and fro, oblivious to the tenants in the apartment beneath me, madness, madness. Waste and shit and madness, I said to myself over and over as I walked to and fro in my apartment making plans somehow to avoid encounters such as the one with the man on the bicycle, whom I wanted to never again see. I trembled at the thought that someday I might see him again as I wandered the city ostensibly in search of a job, though I never applied for a job, had not applied for a job since I had been turned away by a clerk at the Dresdner Bank, not by a personnel manager, but by a lowly clerk, by someone whose position I aspired to obtain. I did not even get to talk to the personnel manager, you see, that's my point. That was the last time I had applied for a job. Humiliated, I left the bank and vowed never to apply for a job again, though I told my landlady, Frau Weger, I was looking for work, everyday Frau Weger wished me luck on my search, Viel Glück, Herr Weigle, as I walked out the door of the building fearful of encountering again the man's tennis shoe, so fearful I told myself I would no longer look at the feet of the people I encountered - I promised myself never to look again at the feet of others, but on the bus or the tram or the S Bahn or on the sidewalk or in the park, I always nonetheless stared at their feet, and always in a terrible fear that I would see the tennis shoe of the man with one leg I had encountered in an area I had never before been.

"Do you understand?" I said, then thought what a foolish question to ask this young woman, surely no more than eighteen and noticed as I looked at her feet that she wore thick, heavy brown boots, the kind one might expect to find on a peasant some sixty years past. How could I expect this woman, this peasant woman (But what, I wondered, was she doing on a first class car? Surely she had made a mistake, as had I.) to understand anything of what I had been trying to tell her. What would someone so young know of history or unemployment or tumors or madness or jealousy or landladies or one-legged men or tennis shoes or rats in museums or encounters with tongue-less children or the wind that rattled the storm windows until I could no longer think, or the fish stacked up behind glass, the stench of the cheese, or the perfume counter, bodies bundling up their stench in winter clothing, but nothing could hide the stench or keep me from encounters such as this one, whether I left Berlin or not, whether I rode first class or second, nothing could protect me from the likes of such people as the young woman in the doorway before me.

"Yes," she said, "I understand."

And I rushed past her into the corridor, out of the first class car, as far away from her as possible.