Neither Here Nor There (10 page)

At about three o’clock it occurred to me that I had better head back to Barvaux. It took me until just after six to reach the station because of the pained slowness of my walking and the frequent rests I took along the way. The station was dark and untended when I arrived. No other passengers were about and the walls were without timetables. I sat on the platform on the opposite side from which I had arrived, not knowing when the next train might come along, not knowing indeed if there might be a next train. It was as lonely a station as you could imagine in such a small and crowded country as Belgium. The tracks stretched in a straight line for two or three miles in either direction. I was cold and tired and my ankle throbbed. Even more than this, I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten all day.

In my lonely, enfeebled state I began to think longingly about my old home-town diner. It was called the Y Not Grill, which everyone assumed was short for Y Not Come In and Get Food Poisoning. It was a strange place. I was about to say it was an awful place, but in fact, like most things connected with one’s adolescence, it was wonderful and awful at the same time. The food was terrible, the waitresses notoriously testy and stupid, and the cooks were always escaped convicts of doubtful hygiene. They always had one of those permanent, snuffly colds that mark a dissolute lifestyle, and there was invariably a droplet of moisture suspended from the tip of their nose. You always knew, with a sense of stoic doom, that when the chef turned around and put your food before you, the drip would be gone from his nose and glistening on the top of your hamburger bun, like a bead of morning dew.

The Y Not had a waitress named Shirley who was the most disagreeable person I have ever met. Whatever you ordered, she would look at you as if you had asked to borrow her car to take her daughter to Tijuana for a filthy weekend.

‘You want
what
?’ she would say.

‘A pork tenderloin and onion rings,’ you would repeat apologetically. ‘Please, Shirley. If it’s not too much trouble. When you get a minute.’

Shirley would stare at you for up to five minutes, as if memorizing your features for the police report, then scrawl your order on a pad and shout out to the cook in that curious dopey lingo they always used in diners, ‘Two loose stools and a dead dog’s schlong,’ or whatever.

In a Hollywood movie Shirley would have been played by Marjorie Main. She would have been gruff and bossy, but you would have seen in an instant that inside her ample bosom there beat a heart of pure gold. If you unexpectedly gave her a birthday present she would blush and say, ‘Aw, ya shouldana oughtana done it, ya big palooka.’ If you gave Shirley a birthday present she would just say, ‘What the fuck’s this?’ Shirley, alas, didn’t have a heart of gold. I don’t think she had a heart at all, or indeed any redeeming features. She couldn’t even put her lipstick on straight.

Yet the Y Not had its virtues. For one thing, it was open all night, which meant that it was always there if you found yourself having a grease crisis or just wanted to be among other people in the small hours. It was a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper’s painting ‘The Nighthawks’.

The Y Not is long gone, alas. The owner, it was said, ate some of his own food and died. But even now I can see it: the steam on the windows, the huddled clusters of night workers, Shirley lifting a passed-out customer’s head up by his hair to give the counter a wipe with a damp cloth, a lone man in a cowboy hat lost in daydreams with a cup of coffee and an untipped Camel. And I still think of it from time to time, especially in places like southern Belgium, when it’s dark and chilly and an empty railway line stretches out to the horizon in two directions.

I took a train to Aachen. I hadn’t been there before, but it was only a short journey from Liège, where I had spent the night, and I had always wanted to see Aachen Cathedral. This is an odd and pleasantly neglected corner of Europe. Aachen, Maastricht and Liège are practically neighbours – only about twenty miles separate them – but they are in three countries, speaking three distinct languages (namely Dutch, French and German), yet the people of the region employ a private dialect that means they can understand each other better than they can understand their fellow countrymen.

I got a room in a small hotel across from the station, dumped my rucksack and went straight out. I had a lunch of burger and fries in a hamburger chain called Quick (short for ‘Quick – a bucket’), then set off to see the town.

My eagerness surprised me a little, but I hadn’t been to Germany in seventeen years and I wanted to see if it had changed. It had. It had grown even richer. It was rich enough in 1973, but now – golly. Even prosperous Flanders paled beside this. Here, almost every store looked rich and busy and was full of stylish and expensive goods like Mont Blanc pens and Audemars Piguet watches. Even the stores selling mundane items were riveting – J. von der Driesel, for instance, a stockist of kitchenware and other household goods at the top of a hill near the old market square. Its large windows displayed nothing more exciting than ironing boards, laundry baskets and pots and pans, but every pan gleamed, every piece of plastic shone. A little further on I passed not one but two shops selling coffins, which seemed a bit chillingly Germanic to me, but even they looked sleek and inviting and I found myself staring in admiration at the quality of the linings and the shine on the handles.

I couldn’t get used to it. I still had the American habit of thinking of Europe as one place and Europeans as essentially one people. For all that you read that Denmark’s per capita gross domestic product is forty per cent higher than Britain’s, the Danes don’t look forty per cent richer than the British, they don’t wear forty per cent shinier shoes or drive forty per cent bigger cars. But here people
did
look rich and different, and by a factor of much more than forty per cent. Everyone was dressed in clothes that looked as if they had been purchased that morning. Even the children’s trainers weren’t scuffed. Every car had a showroom shine on it. Even the taxis were all Mercedes. It was like Beverly Hills. And this was just an obscure little city on the edge of the country. The Germans were leaving the rest of us standing.

Not everything was perfect. Much of the architecture in the city centre was blatantly undistinguished, especially the modern shopping precinct, and the bars and restaurants didn’t have the snug and convivial air of those in Holland and Belgium. But then I found my way to the calm of the cathedral close and warmed to Aachen anew. I went first to the Schatzkammer, the treasury, which contained the finest assortment of reliquaries I ever expect to see, including the famous life-size golden bust of Charlemagne, looking like a god; a carved sixteenth-century triptych depicting Pope Gregory’s mass, which I think I could look at almost for ever; and assorted other baubles of extraordinary beauty and craftsmanship.

The whole collection is displayed in three small, plain, feebly lit rooms, but what a collection. Next door was the octagonal cathedral, modelled on the church of San Vitale at Ravenna, and all that remains of a palace complex mostly destroyed during the Second World War. The cathedral was small and dark but exquisite, with its domed roof, its striped bands of contrasting marble and its stained glass, so rich that it seemed almost liquid. It must have been cramped even in Charlemagne’s day – it couldn’t seat more than a hundred or so – but every inch of it was superb. It was one of those buildings that you don’t so much look at as bathe in. I would go to Aachen tomorrow to see it again.

Afterwards I passed the closing hours of the afternoon with a gentle stroll around the town, still favouring my sore ankle. I looked at the large cobbled Marktplatz and tottered out to the preternaturally quiet residential streets around the Lousberg park. It was curious to think that this pleasant backwater was once one of the great cities of Europe, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne’s capital. I didn’t realize until I turned again to Gilbert’s history of the Second World War a day or so later that Aachen was the first German city to fall to the Allies, after a seven-day street battle in 1944 that left almost the whole of it in ruins. You would never guess it now.

In the evening I went looking for a restaurant. This is often a problem in Germany. For one thing, there’s a good chance that there will be three guys in lederhosen playing polka music, so you have to look carefully through the windows and question the proprietor closely to make sure that Willi and the Bavarian Boys won’t suddenly bound onto a little stage at half-past eight, because there is nothing worse than being just about to tuck into your dinner, a good book propped in front of you, and finding yourself surrounded by ruddy-faced Germans waving beer steins and singing the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ for all they’re worth. It should have been written into the armistice treaty at the end of the war that the Germans would be required to lay down their accordions along with their arms.

I went up to six or eight places and studied the menus by the door but they were all full of foods with ominous Germanic names – Schweinensnout mit Spittle und Grit, Ramsintestines und Oder Grosser Stuff, that sort of thing. I expect that if ordered they would turn out to be reasonably digestible, and possibly even delicious, but I can never get over this nagging fear that I will order at random and the waiter will turn up with a steaming plate of tripe and eyeballs. Once in Bavaria Katz and I recklessly ordered Kalbsbrann from an indecipherable menu and a minute later the proprietor appeared at our table, looking hesitant and embarrassed, wringing his hands on a slaughterhouse apron.

‘Excuse me so much, gentlemens,’ he said, ‘but are you knowing what Kalbsbrann
is
?’

We looked at each other and allowed that we did not.

‘It is, how you say, what ze little cow thinks wiz,’ he said.

Katz swooned. I thanked the man profusely for his thoughtfulness in drawing this to our attention, though I dare say it was a self-interested desire not to have two young Americans projectile-vomiting across his dining-room that brought him to our table, and asked him to provide us something that would pass for food in middle America. We then spent the intervening period remarking on what a close shave that had been, shaking our heads in wonder like two people who have stepped unscathed from a car wreck, and discussing what curious people the Europeans are. It takes a special kind of vigilance to make your way across a continent on which people voluntarily ingest tongues, kidneys, horsemeat, frogs’ legs, intestines, sausages made of congealed blood, and the brains of little cows.

Eventually, after walking some distance, I found an Italian restaurant called Capriccio just around the corner from my hotel on Theaterstrasse. The food was Italian, but the staff were all German. (I could tell from the jackboots – only joking!) My waitress spoke no English at all and I had the most extraordinary difficulty getting myself understood. I asked for a beer and she looked at me askance.

‘Wass? Tier?’

‘Nein, beer,’ I said, and her puzzlement grew.

‘Fear? Steer? Queer? King Leer?’

‘Nein, nein,
beer
.’ I pointed at the menu.

‘Ah,
beer
’, she said, with a private tut, as if I had been intentionally misleading her. I felt abashed for not speaking German, but comforted myself with the thought that if I did understand the language I would know what the pompous man at the next table was boasting about to his wife (or possibly mistress) and then I would be as bored as she clearly was. She was smoking heavily from a packet of Lord’s and looking with undisguised interest at all the men in the room, except of course me. (I am invisible to everyone but dogs and Jehovah’s Witnesses.) Her companion didn’t notice this. He was too busy telling her how he had just sold a truckload of hula hoops and Leo Sayer albums to the East Germans, and basking in his cunning.

When he laughed, he looked uncannily like Arvis Dreck, my junior high school woodwork teacher, which was an unsettling coincidence since Mr Dreck was the very man who had taught me what little German I knew.

I had only signed up for German because it was taught by a walking wet dream named Miss Webster, who had the most magnificent breasts ever and buttocks that adhered to her skirt like melons in shrink wrap. Whenever Miss Webster stretched to write on the blackboard, eighteen adolescent boys would breathe hard and let their hands slip below the table. But two weeks after the school year started Miss Webster departed in mysterious circumstances – mysterious to us anyway – and Mr Dreck was drafted in to take over until a replacement could be appointed.

This was a catastrophe. Mr Dreck knew slightly less than bugger-all about German. The closest he had come to Germany was a beerfest in Milwaukee. I’m sure he wasn’t even remotely qualified to teach the language. He taught it to us from an open book, running a stubby finger over the lines and skipping anything that got too tricky. I don’t suppose he needed a lot in the way of advanced degrees to teach junior high school woodwork, but it was clear that even there he was operating on the outer limits of his mental capabilities. I learned more German from watching
Hogan’s Heroes.

I hated Mr Dreck as much as I have ever hated anyone. For two long years he made my life hell. I used to sit during his endless monotone lectures on hand tools, their use and care, genuinely trying to pay attention, but after a few minutes I would find my gaze romping around – thirty-six adolescent girls, all wearing little blue pleated skirts that didn’t
quite
cover their pert little asses – and my imagination would break free, like a dog off its lead, and scamper playfully among them, sniffing and panting around all those long, tanned legs. After a minute or two I would turn back to the class with a dreamy leer tugging at my lips to find that everyone was watching me. Mr Dreck had evidently just launched a question in my direction.