‘Let us stay at home: there we are decent. Let us not go out: our defects wait for us at the door, like flies.’ Jules Renard
The room was long and narrow. I looked out the window and saw the tracks right below me, four straight lines of them. I had a look at the bathroom. One towel, hanging over the toilet bowl. I sat back on the bed, but it wasn’t easy. I kept sliding on the nylon bedspread. The television was a small thing at the far end of the room. I looked for the remote control. There wasn’t one. A train passed. I got off the bed and walked to the telly. A train passed. I turned it on. A train passed.
I was in Bremen. I think I was in Bremen. I was definitely in Germany.
I’d been away from home for five or six days – a city a day, a train a day, a hotel a day – and there were five or six more days to go.
The night before it had been Hamburg. The good-looking city, but the taxi kept going for five or six miles and dropped us at the Hotel Nylon, a big terraced house near nowhere. Nylon bedspread, and sheets. A grey towel in the bathroom. There were three interviews arranged for the afternoon. But only one journalist turned up, and he brought two pals with him, including one who, I found out later, had just written a bad review of the book I was talking about. The journalist took no notes and whispered a lot to his friends. They laughed softly and, now and again, they smiled at me.
The reading that night was fine, a nice, friendly crowd. Then a tour of St Pauli and the red-light district. Women in windows, teenage girls on corners, their skin grey from the cold. In a bar, on a screen above my escort’s head, the same penis penetrated the same vagina for the time it took me to drink two beers, very slowly – it must have been the director’s cut – while my escort knocked back Scotch and stuffed the receipts into his pocket. Then back to the Hotel Nylon, and Bremen the next day and another Hotel Nylon, and another night between nylon sheets.
A train passed. Every ten minutes. This was Germany. Coal, steel, cars, beer. All night.
But I don’t blame Germany. And I don’t blame my escort, although his disappointment was there in his sad, red eyes; stuck with an Irish writer who wouldn’t drink with him under the table – it was in his sighs, in his disappearances and returns. But I don’t blame him.
I blame myself. I should have gone home after the second day. And I blame the sheets. It was the nylon that did it. I went to bed cold, lay awake, cold, woke up, cold. Got on the wrong train; got off. Got on the right train. The escort suggested a drink. Half-ten in the morning.
No, thanks.
Silence. All the way. He went away, and came back. Went away, came back. (I remember the book I was reading. In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, by Timothy Garton Ash. I took it down off a shelf a few minutes ago, and it opened at Page 208. ‘The degree to which the German nation actually had been “held together” can also be overstated.’ That must have been the page I read on the train to Hamburg, over and over, while my escort sighed, and went away.) Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne. We got on the wrong train, twice. We missed the right train, once. We got off in the wrong town, once. Nine days, ten.
Most of the readings were fine. They even paid me for some of them. Money in brown envelopes.
Count it, please.
A few drinks with the organizers.
How are the relationships between the Irish writers and the English writers?
They’re grand, thanks.
But always back to the nylon sheets. Cold floor, cold radiator. Remote control – no batteries. The grey towel that followed me all around Germany. One hotel was bang against the tracks; another, I swear to God, was on the centre of a roundabout, on the far edge of the outskirts of I can’t remember where. Broken phone, no phone. Cold coffee, no coffee. The only thing warming me was my self-pity.
We walked down a street – I don’t remember where; we’d an hour to kill because a journalist hadn’t turned up. We passed a café. I read the name – The Writer’s Café.
Will we go in for a coffee? I said.
No.
My escort had given up on me. Four days to go, maybe five. I whinged on the phone, every night. I held the hand-set out the window.
Listen.
A train passed.
What was that?
Germany’s economic fuckin’ miracle.
Why don’t you come home?
Why didn’t I?
I don’t know. Loyalty to my publisher? Cowardice? Fear of the consequences? I don’t know.
But, really, I do. I began to enjoy it. I woke up each morning hoping that this new day would be worse than the last one, or at least as bad. A missed train, the wrong train. A frosty silence. (‘Such, then, were the sad puddles of Germanity which were all that was left, at the founding of the Federal Republic…’: page 232 of In Europe’s Name. There’s a small coffee stain on the page. The sudden news that we were going in the wrong direction? The dash to get off? I don’t remember.) An obnoxious journalist; no journalist at all. A photographer who wanted me to stand in a river and stopped talking to me when I wouldn’t.
I pointed at a line on the menu.
What’s this?
The bowel of the sheep.
And, always, the hotel. And, always, the sheets. I slid between them and lay there, cold, lonely, happy. This was what it was all about – this was misery, this was writing, and this was the writer’s life.
It ended.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
It was very successful, I think.
Yes. Goodbye.
Home. Three in the morning. The bed was too warm. I lay on the kitchen floor and missed Germany.