On the Autobahn, a sudden freedom fills the car. They roll down the windows and turn the radio up loud, the latest pop songs neither of them knows. Helena puts down her sunshade to dim the intense light of the sinking sun. They’re heading south because that exit came first. It doesn’t matter anyway. At this time of year, nowhere within an hour or two of Berlin will be particularly warm.
They joke about the unappealing names of the places they pass and the dull-sounding roadside attractions: a historical sawmill, a mining exhibit, a museum of woven handicrafts. But after a while, the joke gets a little old, and Helena begins to wonder where they are going to stop.
“And ideas yet?” she asks.
“What?”
She turns down the music and asks again, louder, because the windows are still open, the air screeching in to drown them out. She begins to feel cold and puts hers up.
“To be honest, I don’t really know Brandenburg,” he says. “It’s so close but I guess I haven’t seen much of it.”
“I guess we never went away for the weekend,” she says. It’s the kind of thing you’re not supposed to say in a fight: always this, never that. But it doesn’t matter now. After all this effort to hold onto her, is he really going to dump her because she criticized his vacation plans? And then a sinking feeling of guilt: It isn’t fair to keep leading him on, making him think it’s all going according to plan, winning her over, when really… But that’s what he gets for lying to me in the first place, she reminds herself. Why should I be honest when he isn’t?
“We never used to,” he corrects her.
After an hour or so, they stop at a gas station so she can use the bathroom. Dusk is eating away at the edges of the sky like age at the corners of an old photograph. She’s ravenously hungry but he doesn’t want to stop for dinner until they’ve arrived. Wherever that’s going to be. The only reason it doesn’t turn into a fight is because she can’t be bothered. Instead, she demonstratively buys a pack of stale trail mix and eats it in the parked car while he does some belated research on his smartphone.
“Why don’t you ask the guy in the shop if he knows somewhere?” she asks. “He probably lives around here.”
“No, I think I’ve found something. The 3G’s just so slow.”
It would be like this. They never went out anywhere unless she planned it. Even if he wanted to take her out to dinner, even if it was a special occasion, he never gave any thought to where they should eat. And the few trips they did go on were spoiled for her because of his complete unwillingness to get involved in the planning. Well, except for that vacation in Mauritius, but that had been at the beginning, a misleading exception. He always left everything to the last minute and figured things would work themselves out, when really all that ever happened was that she worked everything out.
And now, for once, she let him have his way and be “spontaneous” about things. Which is why she’s spending her Friday night choking down mealy peanuts in a dark parking lot in the middle of nowhere. You forget the old fights when you’re not together anymore, and you wonder afterward what used to bother you so much. But the fights are still there, waiting to be resumed the moment you get involved again. Which is why you don’t. Or shouldn’t. She feels a heavy, indigestible certainty in the pit of her stomach that she made the wrong decision. What if she’d stayed in Berlin and seen Tobias again? But even seeing him would’ve been about Joachim.
“How about Rosenteich?”
Startled, she spills an assortment of raisins, nuts, and unidentifiable shriveled objects onto her lap. She gathers them together, opens the door and throws them on the ground.
“Maybe they’ll still have some roses in season, right?” he says in a put-on, cajoling tone that embarrasses her.
“Where’s that?”
“South of Cottbus.”
“Cottbus?” Her only association with the place is as a grim region of empty concrete socialist buildings and emptier streets she once passed through after Reunification. But countryside’s countryside, and they’ll have to sleep somewhere tonight.
“Sure,” she says. “Sounds great.” It’s not always possible to keep all the sarcasm out of your voice, or to be sorry about it.