Newcomers

A
ND HE CONTINUED
talking about himself without noticing that this couldn’t interest the others as much as it did him.
Leo Tolstoy,
The Cossacks

SINCE THIS ISN
’
T A NOVEL
, there isn’t a thing I can change about my hero.
From the epilogue to
Book Three

A
CERTAIN INDEPENDENCE
exists by the grace of God. In each individual person. Every single one. Everyone carries his own head on his shoulders.
Alfred Döblin,
A Trip to Poland

I
NTERESTING
IS AN IMPORTANT WORD
. Interesting doesn’t lead into that opaque, torturous “depth” that we know so well, and it doesn’t immediately lead to Goethe’s realm of the “mothers,” that popular German destination – interesting is by no means identical with entertaining. Translate it literally: inter - esse: amid being, which is to say amid its darkness and its glimmer. – “The Olympus of Seeming.” Nietzsche.
Gottfried Benn,
A Double Life

T
HAT
’
S HOW WE LEFT
B
ASEL
. The Gerbergässli … rue Helder … Steinenvorstadt … Nadelberg … rue de Bourg. A lot of people came to our building, mostly police. Some wearing uniforms, others in plain clothes. Among the latter were some who looked like businessmen from the city center, while the wide-brimmed black satin hats on some of the others made them look like dancers from the variété. Two in uniform accompanied us with our most essential luggage across the Luisenplatz to the train station as people stopped and stared. We crossed a footbridge over a tributary where scarcely two hours before I had been playing with the yellow riverbed gravel at the foot of an artificial cliff. So we were going after all … So long, Basel!

W
E WERE
underway by one in the afternoon … I walked in and out of the compartment … the windows on both sides of the train car offered interesting views of the buildings and people … In the corridor I had a whole window to myself. Every now and then mother would call out to me not to lean on it so much or I’d get filthy, and to come back and join Vati and her in the compartment where they were sitting with Gisela … I ignored her, I felt ashamed to sit next to her … I pressed my ear up against the pane to drown out her voice. This was my first proper train trip … All I could remember of my first actual trip, when I was five years old and went with Vati to a sanatorium in Urach and back home to Basel, were the blue upholstered benches
in the Pullman car … Now I could see what Basel was like when it got dizzy. At first like a fat, gray-green snake flying backwards, half on the ground, half in the sky … into a sort of huge sucking tube in the distance behind us … a proper dismemberment, a torrent, a hurricane. Then I saw a glass ball slowly swimming across the sky. I couldn’t tell whether it was the cupola of the exhibit hall at the fairgrounds or the main railway station. Buildings wriggled by under the train … I recognized some of them, but only from the street side. What was disappearing behind us was more interesting than what was coming toward us from up ahead. So I turned my head back … The red, star-shaped roof of the St. Alban’s gate that I’d run through at least a thousand times leapt into view … Adieu, adieu … then a long street appeared, perhaps the rue de la Couronne … with buildings washed yellow from exhaust or sulphur … A chain-link fence started to reach higher and higher up the window until it took over the whole field of vision, with numerous red tennis courts behind it. Vati and I had come here once on a long walk and watched from the shade as two couples played … The pictures in the window changed quickly, as though I had rapidly multiplying eyes. The tops of chestnut trees swarmed into view, and before I got a good look at the expanse of black, grassless earth full of bicycles and benches where they stood, I heard shouts and squeals and splashing water as the train went straight up over the white wall of the Eglisee. It was full of swimmers in bathing caps with inflatable balls in the water, and swimmers on the steps, on the wall … I didn’t see the big white ball with handles in the pool. I used it to learn how to kick in the
water when Margrit and I came here … I noticed it by the wall, in the grass, where a bunch of hands were reaching for it … The white, square tower with its clock and pennants on halyards appeared … but the roof of the Eglisee had already evaded the train car in a wide arc, and all I could see at this point were some legs on the roof and a man’s feet … Then trees concealed the frolicking little hollow with their crowns.

It’s hot out there, I thought smugly, but in here there’s a breeze. All up and down the shady corridor the drapes kept battering against the windows and doors … God had chosen a totally ordinary, totally stupid day like this to send me on this train trip … far, far away to a country where Vati had lived as a child and then later as a slightly older boy. Up ahead, beyond the buildings and trees that were flying back into Basel like drizzle … on the far side of the clouds and the arrogant mountain that kept retreating ahead of us, no matter how much the train tried to reach it … on the far side of some mountain slope I was going to encounter all kinds of things that were appropriate for my age … whether those were toys or buildings, animals or people, cars or airplanes. At night nothing like it would ever have occurred to me … and I had never even dreamed about Vati’s country, let alone imagined anything like it during the day …

After Vati’s and mother’s compartment, right next to the bellows-like connector, there was also a WC. It was so tiny and silly, like part of a gnome’s house. The toilet bowl shook and creaked crankily as I peed, as though it didn’t like being a toilet and would rather have been a milk jug, a chair, or at least a vase … The other door leading to
the back of the train opened and people came out of it into the corridor … Through the narrow door I could see the other cars swaying like drunken houses … The people were carrying waxed yellow or round, red, lacquered suitcases that were too big and too heavy, they were as excited as I was, and happy … Their clothes exuded a smell that I inhaled with that of their skin and their hair. What a lucky coincidence that I was traveling with such childlike people, such scampish jokers … A splendiferous gentleman closed the car door behind him and put his bag in the compartment where Vati and mother were sitting. He stood by my window. He smelled of all different colognes, different down below than up above. He was wearing white trousers, a serious, striped jacket and a stiff red necktie. His eyebrows and mustache were equally thick and black, and could have been switched out with each other and replaced at random. He looked like a millionaire or a gangster from America … there was something of a boxer about him, or a trained horse, or even a camouflaged tank. Around his wrist, which he held next to the ashtray, was a watch that I’d seen in store windows: it had a green frigate riding atop its second hand. He smiled at me, which made me feel awkward, and I didn’t know where to look … and so he smiled again, revealing such brilliantly white, perfect little tiles between his red lips and black mustache that I couldn’t believe a person could have teeth like that … I lost so much time with smiles and furtive glances that in the meantime a completely different picture came through the window … We were riding through a pale blue sky with the sun up above in one corner of the window, like an unleashed crown. Dark red brick bell towers, one bigger than the
next, appeared and rotated with pairs of saints, the peaks of their roofs articulated with spikes and balls and a different cross on top of each tower. The biggest one of them was probably the Münster with its fountain down below that I liked wading through up to my knees. Now we’re going, now we’re going, I sang into my lips … Suddenly there was a huge rumble and through the window steel girders flickered past this way and that, and below them the Rhine appeared with black bands of waves … On it were long, flat barges with closed hatches that carried coal and charcoal for irons … Above the Rhine stood a white building marked
NEPTUN
right on the water amid train tracks and coal cars, and through the window of the compartment I could also see the Mittlere Brücke with people and struts. The racket was so loud that I could have screamed and kicked doors and nobody would have scolded me for it … I touched the door and, as in some noisy dream, I wanted to say something special, but all I could say was “Wie schnell wir fahren,”
^*
and then I shut up, disappointed … I started to hum Vati’s song, “Ljuba Kovačeva, two beers, we’ve got no cash …” of which all I understood was the surname, which sounded like ours. The infernal clamor died away and was replaced by a soundless silence, as though the train had become a balloon, a zeppelin, a glider slicing through the air with a whoosh as though it were silk … then came small, withered bushes and smaller houses … Basel was strangely disappearing through the windows … a building from the city had just been here, and now instead of it there was already a big hill.
This was a speed I could appreciate … I could feel a jaunty tick-tock at the back of my head … I was traveling, traveling through an endless expanse to a country that had lots of horses waiting in stables, and I would unhitch one of them and ride him down to the river so he could drink water … and there would be red boats, so I could row from one riverbank to the other. On the rooftops there would be biplanes ready to take off, and I would fly around in them … over the rooftops and the water … and when they called me to dinner, I would land on the roof and climb down the chimney on a ladder back into the house. I pictured the short, stodgy airplanes that they used for acrobatics at the amusement park, with an open cabin for the pilot … one of them, a red one, would have my name stenciled on it … and I would fly all around in it, over the ponds and white gravel paths of the parks … If I stood by the window, the train went forward faster than if I left it alone … Outside all that was left was greenery, and only here and there some tree would try to finagle its way into the corridor, but of course it couldn’t. My legs became wooden from all the standing, and my eyes … and when the sun started to go down … a huge red tunic … I went back into the compartment.