Authors: Unknown
And there we are with our big packs. We’re like turtles getting jostled. We are out of the train, and we’re down the ladder. We’re not at a station, we’re on the dirt, in the middle of the night, running with these refugees that are going this way and that. We don’t know if there’s a fire, or what’s going on.
We are just
terrified
. I’m kind of a coward, and it suddenly seems like a nightmare of a bad idea, what we’ve done in coming here.
But eventually there seems to be a dominant stream. They’re sending the whole front of the train to the back of the train. The train is being split in the night. We climb back up, and, well, if it was packed before, there is now no room at all. It’s really panicky. I just want some space, somewhere to be. I want to get safely to Berlin, and I want to cross that wall. We’re pushing, and the compartments are overflowing. We make our way to the end of the car, and the last compartment at the end of the car has the curtains drawn.
So we give it a yank, and we hear someone scream, “Fuck!”
Now I have to tell you, you cannot learn to curse like an American. You know what I’m saying?
I have an Israeli friend, Motti, and I remember he would always be like, [
Israeli accent
] “Nathan, I give a shit.”
I’d be like, “No, no, Motti, you
don’t
give a shit.” You know? He still can’t learn it.
Point is, that is a
pitch-perfect
“fuck” that I get.
So we’re like, “Fuck, did
you
say ‘fuck’?
We
say ‘fuck’!”
It’s this chorus of joyous “fucks.”
And then the door flies open. We jump in. It slams shut.
There are two American frat boy types in there, and the dudes have eyes like saucers. They are as scared and panicked as we are.
And this is the embarrassing part of the story, but any of you who are my age who backpacked back then can bear witness: we honestly all deeply believed that Europe was filled with small bands of ninja robbers who were trained solely to rob nineteen-year-old Americans. Like, they wanted the bounty of half a joint and a Cowboy Junkies mix tape. As if on the black market you could feed a family off such a prize.
The even more embarrassing part of the story is we also honestly believed—it’s so stupid—but we told each other that they would gas you. That they would have tanks of sleeping gas, and they would knock you out, and then take your stuff. So we all traveled with ropes or bicycle chains, and we’d lock the train doors.
Well, guess what? These guys have a bicycle chain, and we are thankful for it, because people are screaming and pulling and yanking and banging at that door. But the train starts moving on, and the banging sort of subsides. Every once in a while, there’s more banging and screaming outside, but that door’s not coming open for anyone.
And in the way you can make a home anywhere, the four of us are now a team. We’re a group. We’re safe. The adrenaline drains out, and we pass out.
We wake up in the morning, and it is beautiful. I’ve never been so overjoyed at seeing a morning like that. Sun streaming in. It is lovely. It’s bucolic. And it’s dead silent. There’s just trees outside the train. And we’re waiting, and we’re not moving, so I go to check what’s going on. And I go out into the corridor, and I suddenly very much understand why it’s so silent.
There’s nobody else in the car. Our car is completely empty. So I look into the next car, and then I understand why it’s empty. Because there
is no
next car. There’s no locomotive. There’s no train.
I look behind us, same difference. We’re a car alone. We’ve been unhooked. At some point in the night, we’d lost our train. I also then understand that maybe one of those people banging and pulling and screaming in the night was a friendly conductor trying to tell us there was a second switch.
So I go back into that compartment, and, honestly, we’d had a very bad night. And this is very difficult information to relay.
You know: “
There’s no train.
”
“What do you mean there’s no train? Where are we?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what station?”
“I don’t know what
country
.”
So they come out and see that we’ve, indeed, lost the train. And we don’t have iPhones; there’s no compass. We only know which way our bodies were hurtling through space last night. So we put on our packs, and we step down onto the tracks, and we hike.
We see a station in the distance, which is good, and we hike towards the station. And there’s another fact that I have not forgotten in the twenty years since, which is when you show up at the station without the train, the platform is
so much higher
than you would think.
But they hop up. Joel pulls me up. It’s six in the morning. And there’s just one drunken blond dude about our age with a bottle of vodka, sort of stumbling around on the platform—looking happy, not scary.
We go up to him to inquire:
“Do you speak English? And what country are we in?”
He does speak English. He’s been out partying. He’s just finished his degree. He’s been celebrating drunkenly all night. We are in the German Democratic Republic, in East Germany. We are in the city of Dresden. And guess where he’s going home to? He is headed home to
Berlin
. So our group of four is now five strong. And our train is coming. It’s joyous.
I really just want to get to the wall at this point, and we get on the train. We take our seats. In comes this big, strong East German woman, out of central casting, in this very serious conductor uniform. And she takes our tickets, but our tickets are no good. I mean, try showing up at O’Hare with a ticket from LaGuardia. Our tickets aren’t even from the same country. We have Czech tickets. We did not originate in East Germany. So the tickets are
no good
.
So we pull out Eurail passes, which are good everywhere. But she looks at them, and she doesn’t know them, and they’re also no good. And she makes it very clear that we are being turned off at the next stop.
Now, you know what? I held it together through Israel and
the Intifada, and I held it together through the trip and the night. But now I’m actually terrified.
Because I remember my mother talking about my grandparents, saying, “Oh, yes. These relatives used to write them from across the ocean, and then one day they stopped writing.”
You know what I’m saying? Then they were just
gone
. This is a part of the world that swallows Jews.
And you know what? Those refugees back in our compartment, that’s serious. There’s a reason they’re racing to get away. That wall came down in a day; it could go back up in a day. Half the world was trapped behind it for all those years.
And I just think:
What have we done?
And as I tell you now, back to that Al Qaeda bus tour idea, it’s like:
Did we have to be on the
first bus
? What have we DONE?
So I’m having a panic attack, and Joel’s trying to keep me under control, when I see our German friend—he’s up on his feet, and he’s talking to the conductor. And he’s gesticulating. He’s delivering a sort of Gettysburg Address there. And I mean, honestly, with the morning light streaming in through the windows, he looks almost sober. It’s beautiful. Whatever he’s doing, it’s beautiful.
And when he’s done, this conductor’s hard face goes soft, and out of nowhere she reaches out and punches our Eurail passes, and she welcomes us on the train to Berlin.
We ask our new friend, “What did you tell her?”
And he says, “I told her this. These people have come from America to our country. They’ve come to
see
our country. Are you going to tell them that a ticket that is good in Madrid, that is good in Rome, that is good in Paris, is no good here?
“The great conflict is
over
.
“We are
one world
now. We are, all of us, brothers.”
Nathan Englander
is the author of the story collections
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
and
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
, as well as the novel
The Ministry of Special Cases
. He is the translator of
New American Haggadah
, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer. His play,
The Twenty-Seventh Man
, premiered at the Public Theater in 2012.
WANDA BULLARD
I
’m going to tell you a story about my dad. His name was George Bullard. He was born in a rural area, right up the northeast corner of Mississippi that most folks call British County, and the locals just call paradise.
He grew up with eight other siblings on a farm. He married when he was twenty, had two daughters, and his wife died so he raised those two daughters. And after they were grown, he married my mother, who was about twenty years younger, and they had another family, so I’m the last of the last.
My dad was about fifty years old when I was born, but I was very fortunate to be raised by him.
He raised and trained bird dogs all of his life, and that’s how he made a living. If the bird dog business got a little slow, he’d paint a house or two and do some things like that, but after he got up in his sixties someone convinced him to get into politics. He ran for Board of Aldermen, which is like the city council, and he was elected by a landslide. Everybody loved him.
His assignment was fire commissioner. Now, all the previous
fire commissioners did was go to meetings and make political decisions, but my father liked to get involved, so he went to the telephone company and said, “Can’t y’all hook my telephone up with the one at the fire department?”
So they did, and every time the fire department telephone rang, our phone rang—one long continuous ring until you picked it up—and then you didn’t talk, you just listened to see where the fire was so he could go. And he went to all the fires, day or night. He knew almost nothing about firefighting, but he knew how to encourage young men, so he’d go and encourage ’em.
I got involved because my father had almost stopped driving at night because of his age, and as a teenager I had a driver’s license, so I kept jeans and tennis shoes right there, and I drove him at three o’clock in the morning.
Well, after a few turns as board alderman, several people, myself included, convinced him not to do that anymore, but he found that he missed the camaraderie he had formed with all the firemen, and because the firemen and the police department were in the same building, he missed all the policemen too. So he would just go down there to visit every now and again. And this being a small town, they worked out something which might not have been real legal, but they taught him how to operate the police radio, and anytime anybody wanted a day off or was sick, he’d go in and work an eight-hour shift. Somehow they managed to pay him, I don’t know how.
But one day he got to his job down at the police department, and he discovered, to his amazement, they had a prisoner!
I did say it was a small town. It was most unusual.
And that morning he really didn’t have much to do. He’d wander back and talk to this young man, and when he went out
for lunch he brought a couple hamburgers back for him. Well, by one or two o’clock, he had made a decision about this young man, and he always trusted his instincts about people. He had decided that in spite of being long-haired—way down to here, which my father hated—that he was a decent young man, so he’d see if he could help him.
He started to inquire of him, “Why are you still here? You seem like such a nice young man. Won’t anybody come get you out of jail?”
And the young man told him, “Well, I had a little too much to drink last night, and they arrested me for drunken disorder and here I am.”
My dad said, “Well what would it take to get you out?”
And he said, “Well, I have to pay a two-hundred-dollar fine.”
My dad said, “Well, why can’t your family pay the two-hundred-dollar fine?”
He said, “Well, I think if I could talk to my father face-to-face I could get the two hundred dollars from him, but I don’t know how he’s going to react to a collect call from the Boonville jail.”
Well, my dad mulled this over a little while, and he said, “Well, do you think if I turned you loose, you could go find your father and get two hundred dollars and come back?”
I’m going to remind you that my father’s only duty was operating the police radio that talked back and forth with the cars.
So the young man said, “Well, see, I’m from Corinth, Mississippi, and that’s about twenty miles north of Boonville. You know they impounded my car. I think I could get the money from my dad, but I got no way to get up there.”
My dad said, “What would you say if I gave you your car?”
He said, “They impounded it.”
And my daddy said, “Well, is it a blue Chevrolet?”
And he said, “Yes, sir.”
And then my daddy said, “It’s parked out in the parking lot. I can probably find the keys.”
So he scrounges around in the desk drawers, and he finds the keys, and he not only releases the prisoner, over whom he has no authority, he gives him a getaway car.
Well, as the kid leaves, my father says, “Now, son, I believe if I could borrow two hundred dollars from my daddy, I’d borrow another five to get me a darn haircut.”
At about four o’clock the policemen started coming back to change shifts, and as they came in, they went to the back to check on the prisoner. And they discovered, to their dismay, that they didn’t have one.
And they said, “Mr. George, what happened to the prisoner?”
My daddy was busy doing his little closing up paperwork, and he said, “Oh yeah. I turned him loose.”
And the police officer said, “You did what?”
“Turned him loose.”
He said, “Mr. George, why did you do that?”
Daddy said, “Well, he just seemed like a nice young man, and he’ll be back in a little while with his two hundred dollars.”
And the police officer was kind of taken aback. He’d known my father all his life, my father was like a grandfather to most of those guys.