There was a reason why Lena was sent to live in Ireland when she was thirteen. She tells Henning how her father said it was for her safety. There was no further explanation. I thought it had to do with me being a teenager out of control, she says. I had got involved in small acts of vandalism around the city after they separated. I tried to stop him getting to know anyone new. I had become a burden. An intruder in his life, watching him eat, watching him picking his teeth, waiting for him to clap his hands at the end of a meal to signal that it was time to move on. I knew too much about him, his words, his clichés, his linguistic mistakes. His German accent was an embarrassment, I thought.
You’re going to Ireland, he said one day, it’s in your best interest to live with your mother for a while. She has a nice school picked out for you over there, you’ll love it, he said. It was just for a year, so I could get to know my mother’s side. He packed my case, each item laid out on the table and ticked off the list. That was it, she says, we were on a flight the next day, handed over into my mother’s care in a house full of drugs, looking back home across the Atlantic.
I loved my father, Lena says. We used to have great fun together. He could be very funny. He would tease me about the way I came in from school and left my shoes and my coat lying on the floor, like a snake shedding its skin. And I would get him back about his hair, telling him he looked like a parking lot full of weeds.
He was having some trouble at work at the time, he told me, but he never went into that very much. He worked in a large bakery where everything was mechanized, it was a waste of his baking skills. They mass-produced doughnuts and Danish pastries, and those subs for Philly steak sandwiches. Some of the workers began to victimize an African American employee, calling him names, throwing flour over him, telling him he looked better white, that kind of stuff. It was years later that my father told me all this. I think he was initially glad because they stopped calling him a Nazi. They turned on this black man from Houston, his name was Julian, I remember – Julian Ives. One day they covered him in dough, like human pastry, then threatened to bake him. My father intervened. He called the supervisor and the men told him to get lost, what was a Nazi doing in a place with ovens. When the supervisor arrived, the men said it was all a joke. Everybody shook hands and that was the end of it – no hard feelings. Julian was told to get himself cleaned up and he was given the rest of the shift off. They chipped in and gave him some money so he wouldn’t make an official complaint. Nothing was ever put down in any report. And then one day, Julian was found on the floor with head injuries. My father called an ambulance. The production line kept going, nothing was held up. The black man was in hospital for some time after that.
Lena describes how she and her father used to go on the train to a suburb called Bryn Mawr on Sundays, visiting friends who spoke German. I loved that journey, she says, the time it took going through different town centres. On the way back, the train stopped every couple minutes at each station. As we got closer to the city, the train went through a series of derelict stations where it didn’t stop and I asked my father why? Don’t the people here take the train? Don’t they need to go into the city? We passed through all these boarded-up stations, no lights, lots of graffiti, like nobody lived in that part of the city any more. My father said it was the African American district and I thought they were like dead stations.
One night, she says, coming back from our Sunday trip, we came out of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia onto the street and a car pulled up beside us. One of the men inside leaned out to ask me what age I was. We took a different route home but the car caught up with us and the man called out – hey, Lena, look at you, I bet you’re sixteen now. My father told me to pay them no mind. He took me into a diner and we sat there for an hour while the car kept passing by every now and again. I asked him what they wanted, and he told me they were workmates, probably drunk, it was nothing to worry about.
Then I suddenly found myself in West Cork, thinking – what did I do to deserve this? Like I was being sent to the rainiest part of the world as punishment for letting men talk to me out the window of a car.
Ireland was a foreign country to me, she says. He might as well have sent me to live on Pluto. Even though the language people spoke was English, it was totally different, everybody calling each other boy. I hated the landscape, the hills, the narrow lanes. I hated the school, the weather, the sight of the sea made me sick. I wrote letters to my father begging him to take me back. He replied each time, saying he was missing me and asking me to hold out. At one point, because I refused to speak to the teachers, my mother opted for homeschooling, but that was an even bigger disaster.
After I got back to Philadelphia, Lena says, my father finally told me what happened at the bakery. He opened up one day and said the black man had been pushed off a steel platform by two of their work colleagues. The police were brought in to investigate and my father told them he had seen them forcing Julian Ives over the railing.
My father made little mistakes in his sentence structure. That’s what made him so convincing, like everything was being translated simultaneously from German in his head while he was speaking. He used some ancient words that he must have got from books and nobody used any more. Like the word merriment. After the men had pushed Julian Ives over the railing, they were full of merriment. He heard them laughing over the sound of the kneading machines.
And that’s when the trouble started, she says. They began to threaten my father and follow us in the street. The black man, Julian Ives, recovered from his injuries and went back to work. Nothing more was said about the incident. My father quit his job and found work in a small bakery further away. He carried this alone. He didn’t talk much. Maybe he was trying to shield me from the truth by sending me to Ireland.
What would it take to bring those stations back to life? Lena wonders.
I go visit people I know in Philadelphia from time to time, she says, and they’re still there, the dead stations we used to pass through when I was a girl. Nothing has changed. The hoarding is still there preventing people from getting in and out. The train still goes through without stopping. It’s like passing through a different country, like train stations that don’t belong to America. Like some faraway place has been lifted up and put down at random in the middle of Philadelphia.
I’ve taken a series of photographs from the train, Lena says. I’ve gone there in a taxi and taken pictures of the entrance to some of the stations, all the graffiti and the dust of traffic layered on the walls, some with the scorch marks of fires in the doorways. I try to imagine them back in service, with people standing on the platforms and the trains stopping as they once did before I was born. I can see them painted up in bright new colours and people so proud of their station they will add hanging baskets in summer, maybe an old wheelbarrow with a display of flowers, like they do in some of the other stations further on the line out to Bryn Mawr. What would it take for that to happen? she wonders. What would make those stations viable once more? A whole country would need to change. All I can think of doing is to take more photographs. Next time I get back, she says, I will go and talk to the people who live there. Maybe I can put it together as an exhibition. Call it something like – Bringing Up the Dead Stations.