Riding the Iron Rooster (3 page)

The only empty seat in the dining car at lunch was next to Wilma. It seemed as though everyone was avoiding her, but when I sat with her everyone avoided me. She told me she had been fired from her job, selling toys somewhere in London. She complained that the New Zealanders had made a hoo-hah about her immigrating, but that she was going there just the same, probably for good. She said she liked a challenge.

I made a note of the fact that we had just stopped at Liège. I had an idea that I could look it up later and write
We passed Liège, famous for its lacemaking and its sausages, birthplace of Georges Simenon...

Wilma said, "You're always writing."

"No, I'm not," I said, too quickly, and I thought: Stop looking at me!

I dozed after lunch and was awakened by Morris saying, "Hey, Kicker, it's Aachen!" And both men stood in the aisle, blocking the traffic.

It was obvious that the Germans on the train were very irritated by these two loud Americans, and would probably have been very glad to throw them off. It was unlikely that the Germans were able to follow the loud twanging monologue in which Morris revealed that he had been in the three-week battle for Aachen during the war. This monkey was a liberator! It seemed poetic justice that he had returned to bore the pants off everyone within earshot.

At Cologne I noticed that there were four new people on the tour. They were French—three women and a man. They stayed together. They spoke to no one except themselves for almost the whole trip. They quarreled a great deal, but no one knew why. About one month later, in southern Mongolia, I saw one of these French women standing alone on a railway platform. We had just eaten a disgusting meal of cold potatoes and mutton fat.

I smiled and said in a companionable way, "Isn't the food dreadful?"

"When I am traveling I don't notice the food," this woman said. "But of course when I am in Paris I am very particular about what I eat and demand only the best."

That was all she ever said to me.

Even here in Germany I could tell that the French members of the tour were not extroverts. But that was fine. I was also keeping to myself, and it was agreeable not to be pestered with questions.

It was near the end of a long day. We passed Wuppertal, piled against a hillside—full of steep ugly tenements. There were slag heaps at Unna, and farther on at Hamm and Gütersloh, it seemed as though the Germans had succeeded in miniaturizing Indiana and putting it down here. The rain blackened Bielefeld, and I prayed for night to fall and simplify this landscape with darkness. Prosperity had disfigured Germany, and the whole country looked blighted with industrial civilization. Under the brown sky of Münsterland there were factories called Droop und Rein and Endler und Kumpf, which seemed like doom-laden names. The peculiar dreariness about this part of Germany was the absence of trees. The Germans identified with forests, but acid rain had killed half of them and the other half had been chopped down; the trees had been replaced with factory chimneys.

Earlier in the day, the people in the group had been talking like patients in a hospital. The travel had frightened and tired them. They dozed, and when they woke they asked each other questions. How did you sleep? How was the meal? What time is dinner? They began to describe the progress of their bowels. They reported on how they felt, and whether they were tired or hungry.

I watched closely for meaningful changes—women who begin to screech, men who stop shaving, or anyone who puts on a tracksuit.

At Helmstedt we crossed the border into East Germany. The train passed between a pair of barbed-wire fences, a passageway about as wide as a turnpike. Every few hundred yards there was a watchtower and bright lights and the silhouettes of soldiers standing sentry duty.

Beyond the border was a landscape of snow and mud—the spring mess in the slender trees of the postwar woods. What cities I could see seemed far drearier than any I had seen in West Germany, but the countryside was noticeably wilder and more wooded, with huddled farms and poorly lit roads. There were not many people visible, but those I saw here really did look like peasants.

We arrived at Zoo Station ("Hold on to your handbags, this place is full of drug addicts") in the dark. With its twinkling lights and the traffic, Berlin seemed romantic and lively to some members of the group—they regarded it as the last frontier of civilization. After this was Poland, then Russia, then Mongolia. Berlin was gaiety and sex, bookstores and fatsos. It looked richer than America.

But Berlin seemed to me a monstrosity and not much fun. It is such an odd specimen, such a special example of metropolitan schizophrenia, that its conceits and hypocrisies are fascinating. But it is also a fool's paradise, and it is hard to think of anyone living there for any length of time and remaining sane. It is an ancient city, and it was itself for 700 years; but under the Nazis it cracked, it stopped being a city and became a symbol, and then an idea, and after the war it was rethought and the idea reduced to an absurdity. It is still a bad idea and it is growing worse. Any sensible person has to find it a monumental illustration of stupidity, petulance and stubbornness. It would be laughable if it were not so pathetic, for as Nathanael West said, nothing is sadder than the truly monstrous.

Helmut Frielinghaus, a Düsseldorfer, was himself a visitor to the city. He said to me, "Do you want to see the most interesting place in Berlin?"

I said yes.

He took me to the "Ke De We," a huge department store that is known by its initials rather than its full name, Kauíhaus des Westens. What he wanted to show me were the floors devoted to food, and in particular the stalls and shops that retailed expensive and pretty delicacies.

'This is the new thing," Helmut said. 'The food culture. People are obsessional about it. You see? Two hundred kinds of cheese, forty kinds of coffee, twenty-eight sizes of sausage, and also food for vegetarians, food for health cranks, a whole shop selling fish eggs."

They were food boutiques, selling snob food, rare and indigestible items, all prettily arranged and beautifully wrapped. Pastries, fruit juice, ninety kinds of bread, a whole wall of tea caddies, every possible shape of pasta. At first glance it was not food at all, but specialist merchandise set out like expensive clothes. If there was such a thing as designer food, this was it. Perfect penile asparagus, each spear labeled, $20 a pound.

I developed a horror-interest in the meat section, where stall upon stall was laden with cuts of meat—gleaming red flesh that had been trimmed with great care: legs, shoulders, feet, rumps and elbows, a whole rack of tongues, a case of hearts, a brisket with a paper cap, pigs' heads wearing ruffled collars. Most of the meat was decorated in this way—a sort of dramatic presentation, so that the last thing you thought of was slaughter or butchery.

There were more browsers than shoppers, which was the weirdest thing of all—people gaping at food, and salivating and moving on ("Look at those fish cheeks, Wolfgang!"), and the effect of this scrutiny and obvious hunger was of the food being used to tempt and titillate, and so it all seemed to me—and the meat especially—the most modern kind of pornography.

"Good, no?" Helmut said. "If you see that, you understand Berlin."

We were leaving the "Ke De We" when we saw a stop-press edition of a German paper saying that American planes had bombed Libya. This was in retaliation for the bombing, supposedly by Libyan terrorists, of a dance hall here in Berlin. The news had traveled fast. Already, young Germans had started to gather near the Europa Center for a demonstration, and police vans—about thirty of them—were parked just off the Kurfürstendamm. Policemen were unloading steel barricades and stacking them by the roadside.

Helmut said, "We have only recently discovered how different we are from the Americans."

He spoke with slight bitterness. I decided not to remind him of Germany's uniquely horrible history.

"I think we bombed Libya because we have been dying to bomb someone in the Middle East ever since the hostage crisis," I said. "Iran humiliated us more than any other country has done in recent years. We still haven't gotten over it. I don't think the average American makes much distinction between Iranians and Libyans. They're seen as dangerous and worthless fanatics, so why should we waste our time being subtle with them?"

'That's the way Americans think about us," Helmut said.

"Not really."

If he mentions the war, I thought, I'm going to say
You started it.
But he didn't. He said he found Berlin very strange and provincial; it was mostly old people and had high unemployment. He said he couldn't wait to go back to Düsseldorf.

I spent the rest of the day shopping for provisions. I bought mint tea, sherry, chocolates and antibiotics. Tomorrow we would be in Warsaw, where such things might not be available.

The demonstration began in the early evening when about eight thousand youths chanting anti-American slogans marched towards the American cultural center called Amerikahaus, behind the Kurfürstendamm. The rumor was that they planned to set it on fire. But the police, with riot shields and tear gas, massed in front of it and behind the high steel barricades. The demonstration became unruly and turned into something approaching a riot. Rioters threw stones and broke the windows of American cars, and chased tourists and anyone who looked like an American.

I missed the riot. I was at the Deutsche Oper on Bismarckstrasse seeing
Don Giovanni.
I had gone on the spur of the moment when, back at the hotel, I heard the members of the group arguing about the bombing of Libya, and Kicker saying: "Them fucken Arabs have been asking for that." Do I want to listen to this? I asked myself. Mozart seemed preferable.

I went alone and found it pleasant to have an empty seat next to me, an entire armrest to lean on, and to enjoy this excellent production. But after the intermission the seat was taken by a young woman, and several times in the darkness, while Don Giovanni was gasconading or Dona Anna was singing, this woman was staring at my head.

"Do I know you?" she asked, when the opera ended.

I said no.

"I have this feeling that I do. What is it?"

I sensed what it was, but I didn't say anything. Until then I had been proud of the fact that no one on the tour had the slightest idea that I was a writer—and of travel books about train trips, too. I thought it would inhibit them or else, and just as bad, provoke them to importune me ("Boy, have I got a story for you"). Some of the members of the group I had told I was in publishing, and others I had told I was a teacher. I hardly ever entered a conversation. I listened, I smiled, I made notes. When Kicker was being outrageous I blinked and shuffled away. I was the man who got up from lunch before it was over and people started talking about themselves. I was the man who was constantly drifting away—the man with no last name. I was the man with the book that you didn't want to interrupt. I was the quiet, dim, dull fellow in the old mackintosh, standing and whistling tunelessly on the platform. I agreed with everything you said. You hardly knew me—in fact, it was only when you saw me on the train that you remembered I was on the trip, and even then I was unobtrusive and faintly barmy looking, just harmlessly scribbling.

"I've seen you on television," the woman said. "Haven't I?"

"Probably," I said, and told her my name.

"Amazing," she said. "My sister won't believe this—she's read all your books."

Her name was Rachel Tickler, and I found it a relief to tell her I was on my way to Mongolia and then China—yes, to do some writing—and that I had just come from London. What was that about the States? Oh, yes, I did spend part of the year on the Cape—yes, it's a wonderful place. A far cry from this trip, which was involving me in note taking. I told her everything, I bought her some tea and we sat up late so that I could be confessional. There was no risk. Unlike the members of the tour, Rachel Tickler was a perfect stranger.

It did me a lot of good to tell her these things, because I had been so secretive on the tour it was like being invisible. It certainly wasn't much fun to be the dim, dull fellow in the mackintosh, keeping out of every conversation. Keeping quiet gave me chest pains. I longed to lecture them about the Middle East, and if they gave me half a chance on the subject of travel, I could seize their wrists like the Ancient Mariner, and a tale unfold.

Rachel herself was in Berlin working on lawsuits connected with asbestos hazards, one of the current growth areas in lawsuits. A lawyer from New York, she was attending a conference of insurance companies—reading papers and evaluating information.

Having told her everything, I went to bed strengthened in my resolve. In one sense we were like an adulterous couple—or more accurately it was like a one-night stand. It was tender and I was eager to be candid, and she was a good listener. At five o'clock the next morning I rejoined the group, and it was like being back with a lot of distant relatives.

We had taken the train to East Berlin, and changed, and were now on the Warsaw train, making a slow trip to the Polish border. Police, customs officials, soldiers—it was impossible to tell them apart—got on, examined passports, demanded to see money, scribbled receipts. Theirs was a mysterious business. They all wore old, terrifying shoes.

Poland from the train looked altogether senile—exhausted fields, decaying apartment houses, broken roads, and great, dusty factories. It has the appearance of an elderly country—it is visibly doddering—but it has the most humane and polite people I have ever met, thoroughly gentle and civilized, which is probably the reason theirs is a history of being overrun and occupied.

In my compartment was a little group traveling together—mother, daughter, grandson. They were from Katowice, and being with the daughter reminded me that young Polish women are madly attractive, with clear skin and large, limpid eyes and lovely hair.

"Don't go to Mongolia," Ewa said. "Come to Katowice and I will show you interesting things."