S-Bahn and the Sons of Judah
My travels began fine. The birthday money from Gran got me all the way to Berlin, and I had been following the guidebook she gave me to the letter. Till that afternoon.
I had been napping, smugly thinking I was now a citizen of the world. That getting home a different way from the way I got to the Nikolai-Kirche in Altstadt Spandau couldn’t be that hard. Then I looked up and realised the whole carriage was now full of people in some strange kind of uniform. Not police, not military, not football, but everyone looking the same. All men, all in black, all bearded, all glum. I stood up, holding on to the rail with hands sweaty from fear and from the afternoon heat trapped in the carriages. I panicked. I needed to get off the train. I had been going in the wrong direction for over half an hour. When the train came to a shrill stop at Senefelderplatz I stepped out of the train together with at least a hundred of these men. Walking up the stairs I was a lonely leaf in a river of tar.
The men surging past me all wore coats too warm for the season, any season in any country except maybe depth-of-winter-Kyrgyzstan, and coke bottle glasses I guessed was the genetic result of generations of reading tiny letters in bad, flickering light. Or some strange fashion accessory to their already strange look. I stood to one side and watched them mill by. They were as solemn as a funeral. Not one, not one, smiled or even seemed to notice me. This collective ignoring transfixed me. A strangely comforting feeling of being a nobody came over me. It was like that dream when you’re invisible. I was an outsider but still not looked at sideways or down any nose. I just wasn’t there for them. I walked on and read Prenzlauer Berg on a sign. It didn’t mean much to me, but the sign looked reassuringly official.
Once outside the station I read a big plaque in the ground made by the Pankow Borough and I understood. I was an English girl lost in one of Berlins’ Jewish quarters and the Sabbath was about to arrive. Maybe I was fine? Maybe I should have a little look?
I walked up a street full of people. Saw gold and wigs, kosher sushi and hundreds of immaculate Volvo estate cars. I was standing by a big pile of bananas on a green tarpaulin when a group of boys suddenly ran around the corner and one of them bashed right into me. I fell over and scraped my knee on the pavement, squashed an already brown banana with the heel of my hand and was too surprised to even let out a yelp. There were three of them and all in a big hurry. The last boy, the little cap on his head fastened with a yellow hairclip, in a coal shirt, alabaster vest and newly polished shoes, turned mid-flight and looked like he was weighing up the for and the against – forward and back – sixty times in one second. He smiled apologetically, his face cracking up like a watermelon dropped on the pavement, and ran back a few steps. He grabbed my backpack, extended his hand to help me back up on my feet, and once I was up he nudged me with a look at the corner he’d just sprinted around to come along. Before I had decided what to do I found myself running beside him. At full pelt and grinning like a lottery winner.
We caught up with the other two boys and a surge of joy ran through me. I was out of breath running like I was made out of wind. The boys ran almost in single file and I slotted in between the second and the last one and with them I was cutting corners, running between cars without looking first, jumping over, ducking under, skidding around. Leaving the vaguely known behind me.
Panting and with our hands on our knees the four of us stood behind a huge pile of firewood in the backyard of what looked like a closed-down blacksmith’s. Big sheets of metal someone had hammered on, in vain and a long time ago judging by the rust, stood propped up against the brick walls of a small windowless site office. The ground was covered in nuts and bolts that didn’t belong to each other and over to one side was the disbanded carcass of a bandsaw minus the blade.
Sem whispered the one that was still holding my bag, and pointed first to himself, then to my knee. His eyebrows rose in a gesture of inquiry, I nodded to say I was fine. He gave me back my bag. Ham whispered the tallest one, and then he arched his back, fumbled with his glasses and brushed grains of dirt off his shirt sleeves. Jafet the third whispered. He had curly, mahogany hair almost covering his cap, and a nice smile.
We stood in absolute silence for a while and then, on Sem’s advice, when it seemed danger didn’t have any more cards to play, we walked out of the yard and I said ‘Claire.’ We started to talk in English. Their fourth language or something. Once in a while one of them would say a word in German, or in that other throaty language, and give the others a look. Sem translated. His English was quite good if a bit Queensy. They told me they were brothers and that they had been running from their father who had been close to catching them being home in the afternoon when they should have been at the library playing chess – something none of them knew how to do. Their father should have been at work till six so when they saw him park the car in front of the house they jumped out through a window. They were convinced he’d seen them so they ran feeling his breath on their shoulders and the wrath of all Fathers duped like a lion racing behind them. Then they asked me a hundred questions each about London and the expensive college I had just escaped from, about fish and chips and why my people say it’s raining cats and dogs.
By now we had got to the Volkspark Friedrichshain. Jafet had been walking in silence the last five minutes and not spoken since we came to a standstill, but now he said something in Yiddish. As soon as the words had left his tongue the others shook their heads and laughed. Then the three boys, orthodox Jews in full uniform, sons of Israel, gestured to me to stand still and walked a little way off. They held a short board meeting; with heads bowed, looking just like the older men I had seen standing in the street earlier. Then they all nodded and looked up at me and motioned for me to come with them deeper into the park.
We came to a stop by a fallen barkless tree the colour of limestone. It looked like an oversized chicken bone, discarded by some drunken giant tottering home from the pub. We stood on a little rise watching the city that filled the space between the horizon and us. Jafet produced the thing he had been carrying in his pocket. It was a tin can that used to house upmarket throat pastilles, and it glinted in the disappearing sun. We do this most Saturdays, he said, and opened the tin. On a folded napkin lay four stamp-sized paper squares. Ham took three bottles of sports drink from his bag and handed them out. With a double-taking look Sem gave me his and when I took it he nodded to the others. The sun was now a huge free-range yolk in the sky: darkly yellow and warm. They said Eyns, Tsvey, Dray and took one stamp each out of the tin. Jafet extended the box with the last one towards me. I think I knew what they were doing, what we were about to do, what I was about to do, but I didn’t want to think too much. That’s what the day had taught me: Act, risk, run, leap. Simultaneously we put the stamps on our tongues and then we all shook hands. Dignitaries on a visit to foreign lands. The fluid in the bottle tasted of artificial lemon and the stamp fell off the cliff of my mouth and entered the kingdom of my stomach on a rollercoaster of dextrose.
The brothers smiled. I smiled. We smiled at each other. I closed my eyes and when I opened them there were two colours only: beige and brown. Like a soft version of a black and white filter. The ground was covered in hazelnuts and I looked closely at a thin tree and then I heard it wonder where the water in the river had gone. It was so thirsty, but I had forgotten the osmosis of my schooldays and I tried to tell the tree this while pouring the rest of my sports drink over its roots. A citrus waterfall in orange light.
Next to me Sem and Jafet chatted, throwing words back and forwards like the boys at my college did rugby balls. Hard consonants bustling, wanting to come out faster than their lips could form them. Ham was still standing where he had been before, and when I caught his eye he said I’m the white king, He’s the black king, Jafet’s just a castle, he laughed and lay down, head against the chicken bone tree, headphones on and a smile from curly sideburn to curly sideburn. Afternoon birds returning home came and sat on my shoulders, my arms were branches and I became part of nature’s inherent good. I was calm and nice and warm and gentle and full and happy on Jew’s acid.
I tried to keep hold of things but it became a dance on the spot with my bag for a partner. Images thundered by like wildebeests at war with cherry blossoms and I woke up on a mattress needing a wee but back in the usualness, clothes on, backpack beside me, a plate of sandwiches by my elbow and a note on the floor beside me. You missed the last train. We are sleeping upstairs and so are our parents. I told them you are an exchange student from my school. / Jafet. The light organ in my body had stopped playing and all I could hear was a refrigerator coming on and going off at minute-long intervals.
I was really hungry and couldn’t have been completely chemical-free because I wasn’t worried about anything, nor did I remember how I got to the mattress after the effects had descended in force in the park. I didn’t want to meet their parents, and I wondered if I already had. I wrote many thanks on the back of the note, stumbled out into the hallway and went to the bathroom after opening at least two wardrobes. I decided not to flush and carried my shoes to the front door. It was just after six on the morning and I bought a coffee and stood chewing the sandwich on the first S-Bahn of the day. Despite a ringing head I smiled all the way back to the hostel. And so began my second day in the capital of Germany, and my first day of being eighteen.
Martin Cathcart Froden was born in Sweden in 1978. After living in Canada, Israel and Argentina, he spent several years as a musician in London. On returning to Sweden, he worked as editor of a Stockholm-based arts magazine. Alongside writing, he has studied languages and linguistics. Martin is in talks with agents and publishers regarding his debut novel, and was recently longlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize. He lives in Glasgow with his wife and 3-year-old son.
