by Charles S. Kraszewski.
The fifty year old smiling Frau
entered the carriage at Essen.
Shocking she was
with the simplicity of things
unconscious of their beauty;
the Münster, for example, in its calm verdigris
recumbent, like a Henry Moore sculpture
beneath the Rathaus, which strains puffing
in hooligan steel and glass, to loom over her
but the orange dust that the Nordrhein-Westfalen sun
tosses over the city at evening in some neo-Holi ecstasy
sifts only for her…
“Guten Abend,” she nodded smiling. “Guten Abend,” I nodded smiling in return
and saw my grimace mirrored back to me
twice over through the double pane
as I turned away to mask my incompetence.
But she would have none of that.
We are social animals.
“Ich komme aus dem Regen in die Traufe,” she said,
or might as well have said, for all the good it did me.
So, pawing feverishly through the dusty shelves memory,
I found
“Entschuldigen Sie, aber Ich spreche Deutsch
nicht.”
She nodded smiling.
I nodded back, smiling again.
And coughed.
The train jerked, and off we went, me hoping that she
was one of those irritating people
who hop on an elevator
just to hop off again on the second floor.
Her black and red plaid cellophane bag
full of shopping
rattled.
“Der Brief ist nämlich leider nicht Frankiert, sonst könnten Sie in den ersten besten Briefkasten werfen.” O HimmelherrGott!
I nodded back and coughed and smiled
though in what order those three I can no longer recall.
“Können Sie Englisch?” I ventured. “Nein.” (Smile) “Französisch?” “Nein.” (Smile)
Awkward pause, before the plunge:
“Polnisch?” “Nein. Ich könne nur Deutsch.”
And she let out a river of laughter as sparkling
as the politely regulated Ruhr
on a crisply blue day.
The window slid down of itself with a thump
and she laughed again;
the scent of freshly mown hay
tumbled chaotically into the wagon.
“Ich bin ein Student aus Polen,” I said, resigned to my fate. “Polen ist ein schönes Land.” “Deutschland ist ein schönes Land”
and it was all going so well
that I didn’t want to lose the momentum:
“Alle die LandeLanden sind sch-schöne Landen…”
after which I blushed and leaned back in my seat
opened a book and read the same page twice
all the time her shopping tartan was rustling
with impatient urges to intervene.
We are, after all, social animals
and in the end, good German that she was
Aristotle and St. Thomas got the better of her:
“Heinrich Böll ist tot.”
Now was not the time to smile and nod,
but the Absurd never fails to hand one a rock
when one asks for a loaf of bread:
“Warum?”
Why? Why is he dead?
said the slight cock of dimpled chin and furrowed brow,
till she gathered up her politesse like spilt pearls
and repeated,
slowly this time
“Heinrich. Böll. ist. tot.” “Ah!”
Another tilt, the other way, this time expectant.
My turn to say
“Schade. Er war ein wundervoll K-K-K- Künstler…” K-K-K Künstler, K-K-K Künstler, bist du einzig- einzigst ein den liebe ich… Und wenn der Mondschein—
I bit my lip at the shameful levity
aroused by my bumbling
because even though
between me and you
I’d never read him,
one must only speak kindly of the dead.
She looked down in her lap
as if she’d read my thoughts
then glanced out the window
as the train slowed into Bochum
as if she were arriving for the first time
at the station she’d known
all her pressed and clothesline-aired life long.
With a sigh and a thin smile,
she got up,
then stopped,
plunged her hand into her shopping bag
pulled out an apple
and gave it to me.
“Aber…” “Heinrich Böll ist tot. Aber du nicht.”
And so she got out at Bochum
and after her departure
no one got back into my compartment
ever.