The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [88]
“There was no time for mourning,” my tablemate shook her head. “With the Russian artillery thundering ever closer all through the day and into the night, Mother pulled herself together, took a pick axe, buried Father’s remains, and fled with the clothes on her back and a small bundle, with my brothers in toe, and the seed of a child planted in her womb, walking all the way to Berlin.
“Father posthumously had his wish, a blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter,” she shrugged, with a look that wavered between disapproval and a proud affirmation of self. “The four of us lived together in a cramped attic room with a ceiling through which it rained and snowed. In that leaky attic I grew up with barely enough space to stretch my arms and legs, but there,” she smiled, “I felt protected.
“When I grew up I met and married my husband”—she nodded at the theologian, who cast increasingly concerned looks to see his wife so stirred up with a stranger, to which she replied with reassuring nods. “I became a kindergarten teacher, had a long career, and just retired last year.”
She was horrified, she said, at the number of broken families her pupils came from, one in three in Germany. She hoped to devote her “golden years”—the hackneyed expression took on a freshness framed by her radiant, tightly braided blond head—volunteering to help children in need.
I had stuck around too long to escape the economist’s lecture, but I was preoccupied and don’t remember a word of what he said about the present crisis or his prognosis for the future.
I kept glancing at the theologian’s wife, now seated beside her husband, her hand in his. Born of conflicting legends, we were bound in braided tragedies. And though I still can’t fathom what it means to feel protected, and doubt I ever will, as disparate as our destinies are, there is an undeniable parallel between the motorcycle that carried my father to one kind of freedom and the tank that took her father to another, on both of which history hitched a ride.
Happiest when peripatetic, Peter Wortsman’s restless musings have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the German newspapers The Atlantic Times, Die Welt, and Die Zeit, and the popular website World Hum, among other print and electronic outlets, and in the last three volumes of Travelers’ Tales The Best Travel Writing. “Protected” first appeared in Habitus, A Diaspora Journal, in an issue devoted to Berlin. The text is excerpted from a work in progress in search of a publisher, working title “Ghost Dance in Berlin,” inspired by the six months Wortsman spent as a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. He is also the author of a book of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die, two plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words, and an artists’ book, it-t=i, produced in collaboration with his brother, artist Harold Wortsman. His numerous translations from the German (a verbal form of border crossing) include the German travel classic Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine, and most recently, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist. His column “Rx for Travel” runs in P&S, the journal of The Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
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1. The author was the Holtzbrinck Fellow in Spring 2010 at the American Academy in Berlin. This account is excerpted from a book-length work-in-progress.
LISA ALPINE
The Chilean Cliff Carver
When the heart calls, do you answer?
WE MET IN A BULLRING UNDER THE VELVET CLOAK OF night. An evening lit by a pale pearl, bruised full moon. This was where I first encountered the pitch-black-haired Chilean who sported a smirk on his perfectly chiseled face. He stared at me while I was lifted to the heavens yet again. Not a human sacrifice but a contact dance performance I was hired to do at a private party on the island of Ibiza in Spain.
The Chilean and I skirted each other on the dance floor. Like matador and bull. I find attractive men dangerous and try to avoid eye contact with them. They terrify me.
Just as I did