‘Das Kreuz’ stands in an artificial gap in the woods at the edge of a sheer cliff – and that is all I can remember of it. I do not know why it was built, or the name of the town at the foot of its precipice or even the organisation who set up camp on a plateau of the Swabian Jura. I cannot even remember how long it took to get there. What I do know, I will tell you.
Three years of studying German and I had accumulated all the benefits that came with that amount of time in the Irish school system – about five lines of conversation-starters and no understanding of German culture. But I was eager to prove my independence when family friends in Germany offered to house me for a summer in between the end of one school year and the start of another. Having only lived away from home once before – a three-week stint in Irish college where I was ridiculed for bringing a Bible – it was time to try being European.
The first mistake I made after touching down in Friedrichshafen airport and saying ‘Guten morgen’ to my host, Johann, was approaching his car and trying to sit into the driver’s seat. He laughed and offered me the keys to drive home. As we left the expanse of open fields at the airport, I began to notice the markers of being in Germany – yellow road signs with black font, the whitewashed houses with steep roofs and red roof tiles, strawberry fields with handwritten advertisements along the road to pick your own punnets and signs at the end of every village with its name crossed out. That last one had me lost, and after leaving two or three towns I asked Johann what it meant.
“Es bedeutet dass du das Stadt gleich verlassen hast. Siehst du? Wir sind gerade von Bad Saulgau abgefahren.”
He glanced over to see my confused expression and laughed. “I will help you as much as I can, but we have to speak in German if you want to learn it. If you don’t understand something, just ask and I’ll translate.”
“Ok,” I said. “Could you repeat?”
“Wir sind gerade von den Stadt abgefahren.”
I broke it down word-by-word. ‘Wir sind,’ we are; ‘gerade,’ straight; ‘das Stadt,’ the town – but ‘abgefahren’ required more thought. I understood ‘fahren’ (travel) but could not comprehend the rest.
“Could you translate ‘abgefahren’?” I asked.
“ ‘Ab’ is a conjunction that can mean ‘out of’ or ‘from’. German grammar allows you to use conjunctions with verbs in the nominative case. So ‘abfahren’ means ‘to travel from’ and to say it in the past tense in German you say ‘We are, or have, travelled out of’ – ‘Wir sind abgefahren.’”
I must have looked upset as he quickly rejoined, “Don’t worry. You’ll pick this up. German is an easy language; once you learn a handful of words, you’ll see how we just reuse them in different structures. Aber jetzt müssen wir auf Deutsch sprechen.”
I spoke only German for the following three months.
He smiled. “See? We’ve just departed from Bad Saulgau.”
I repeated the name as he had pronounced it. Baad Saowlgow. I liked the round sounds.
“How many towns left?” I asked.
“Two. Herbertingen and Ertingen.”
“Do you stop in them often?”
“Sometimes I cycle through them when I’m out and wants to be rid of me.”
While Johann teaches German and English at the Gymnasium (higher secondary school), Nicola rules the homestead, gives English tutorials to those who are falling behind and commits herself to the Christian community in the town, Riedlingen.
Cycling became a regular aspect of life. It was the easiest way to travel around a town at that age and gave me a certain stretch of freedom. In the evenings, when the sun lingered ever longer out of the reach of dusk, I would take my bike and pedal along grass paths and gravel roads on the edges of the nearby towns – Altheim, Grüningen, Pflummern, Daugendorf. They could not mean anything to me but noises, and they were my chance to practice the sounds again, and rolling ‘r’s, which I learnt was most important to give an impression that you were not a foreigner.
Johann and Nicola’s house was second-to-last on Andreas-Jerin-Strasse, the northernmost corner of Riedlingen. I wanted to know who Andreas von Jerin was – it turns out, he was a sixteenth-century bishop and imperial envoy who was born in Riedlingen. Each street in the town is named after something, usually a famous person – Heinrich von Kleist and Adalbert Stifter were parallel with us and Johann Goethe connected the three. It was overwhelmingly romantic for me to consider that I was living on the edge of town among great European poets. More romantic still to find out that Riedlingen was situated in a dell caused by extensions from the Swabian Jura. The corner I lived on was bounded on two sides by wheatfields and one side of the horizon was obscured to the northwest by a ridge of wooded hills, the other side of which housed Zwiefalten with its outdoor swimming pool – a distinctly continental luxury. A line of electricity pylons cut the forest in half and then fell out of sight over the ridge. The other side of the horizon was only obscured when the wheat grew five feet tall in high summer. Every morning I would cycle – or if I was early, walk – by this view and think I had discovered a small corner of heaven.
Just beyond the wheatfields is a cold spring well – the temperature stays at two degrees or lower all-year-round. The Capuchin monks – who built a monastery in the town in the seventeenth century – had harnessed the spring and built a two-metre-long and two-feet-deep ditch into the ground. Since then it had been reinforced with concrete and bars and steps. In high summer, locals and tourists pilgrimage there to brave the waters; Nicola told me it was famous for stimulating good blood circulation. You would roll up your shorts, take off your shoes and walk from one end to the other as slowly as possible. We tried to do it quickly because the water was almost unbearably cold, but it was a release from the dense heat, so we usually found ourselves hopping in and out according to the humidity.
Such recreational activities had to be fitted into the rest of the day. The structure of the German day is rigorous and pragmatic. It is uncommon, except for teenagers, to rise after eight a.m. When I woke up for school, usually at half six or seven o’clock, I would immediately head to the kitchen and seek out the basket of fresh bread Johann had already brought back from the bakery. My favourite was the ‘käseseele’ (cheese roll) – a baguette with melted cheese on top. I would cover it with unsalted butter and cold sausage and pop the leftovers in a Tupperware for lunch. School finished at half twelve, while every Thursday it resumed at half two for another three hours’ work. The main, hot, meal of the day was always eaten between noon and two o’clock with no dessert, except on Sundays when, at four o’clock sharp, we would have coffee and cake. Usually at five or six in the evening we would have supper of cured cold meats and salad, followed by drinking espresso and watching forks of lightning from the deck. The hotter the day, the louder the thunder would crack in the evenings.
What I remember most of that summer was the heat. It was not unusual for the pavements to be already warm at half seven in the morning. By lunchtime the cars parked on the street shimmered in a blaze of sunshine. I hated the discomfort of living in forty degrees Celsius but I did love the nets on my windows and hearing the heavy thunder at night.
Johann and Nicola held a family barbeque once a year, usually late July, where they would arrange two picnic benches end-to-end covered in gingham tablecloths and glass tumblers and another table laden with salads, fresh breads and juices. Sometimes Nicola would bring up special blackberry jam she had stored in the cellar with pounds of pasta, pickles, tinned goods and homemade alcohol – the emergency room, I liked to call it. Johann manned a suspended grill over a charcoal fire; the bowl to hold the fire had been set specially into their back porch – ‘deck’ in German – entirely made of stone. The benches would be set up between the deck and the trees and through the branches you could only see the wooded hills that veiled Zwiefalten. Everything had its proper place. But the food was the highlight.
At the age of fifteen I was proud to say that I had never once assented to eating salad, but Nicola would arrange mozzarella and cold homegrown tomatoes from their garden in a circle on their Tanzanian crockery that I could not resist. I tasted real orange juice for the first time, as well as peach ice tea, espresso and currywurst. I knew that Germans were famous for beer and sausages, but I did not yet fathom what lay in wait. The food was never indulgent or heavy – it was filling, hearty and most of all delicious. Bakeries were the greatest danger to my health with sweet treats on display from as soon as 6am. More than once my new friends and I would quickly cycle over to Bäckerei Böck before going home (‘Gut schmeckt was Böck bäckt’).
On especially hot days, those my age would wind up at the Donau-Insel – the smaller end of a small island in between the train station east of the river and the Eis-café west of it – made into a leaf-shape by the convergence of two branches of the river Danube. You could jump off the bridge that joined the train station and Eis-café, right into the river, and then stroll up onto the pebble shore to drink beer with the other indolent teenagers. Some were sixteen and therefore old enough to buy and consume beer – spirits were not allowed for another two years. Those of us who had not yet reached legal drinking age would quickly swig from the others’ bottles while any bypassing adults were not watching.
I asked my friend Inna one day if what we were rinsing our ankles in was really the Danube or just a tributary.
“It is the Danube alright,” she said, “when it leaves Riedlingen, it travels north to Ulm, Regensburg and then through Austria, Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade, touches the border of Ukraine and Romania and then falls out into the Black Sea.”
“I wonder if you dropped anything in would someone find it in another country.”
She laughed. “Have you not heard the story?”
“Which story?”
“Surely Johann must have told you. Miriam. She’s grown up and moved to the Alsace now, but everyone’s heard about her message in a bottle.”
As soon as she said it I did remember; that’s why the thought was on my mind. Johann had mentioned her to me a few weeks previously. It was a favourite story of his from his earlier years in the Gymnasium. One day a colleague of his – Herr Knöpfle, the tenth class Geography teacher – burst into the staffroom waving around an envelope.
“You won’t believe it,” he said, “Miriam has just gotten a letter – from Mexico. Playa del Carmen. This man was out on the beach with his family and he found a message in a bottle – from little Miriam! She wrote it eight years ago and he got it only last week. Can you believe it?”
Noone really could. They asked him if he was sure.
“Of course I’m sure, it’s here, look!”
He held out the envelope and, sure enough, there was the stamp and address from Mexico. The Spanish teacher obliged them with a translation.
“ ‘Senorita Miriam, It was a lovely surprise to receive a letter that crossed the world in such a little glass case, though I am sorry to say I could not read it. I see you wrote it eight years ago from somewhere in Germany and I am so pleased that it was not lost forever, as I’m sure you thought it was. It washed up on a beach here, in Mexico, not too far from Cancún. I hope you will travel as far as your message one day and see the wonders such a journey can bring you. I believe you would like it here and I extend a warm invitation to you whenever you should like to see the Caribbean – my little girls were delighted to think that they could have a friend all the way from Germany. Best wishes for you and for the future, R–’”
I thought again about the distance a bottle would have to travel from Riedlingen to Playa del Carmen. After floating along through Linz, Vienna and Budapest, the Danube Delta and the Black Sea, it would have to get through Istanbul and Gallipoli without being caught in a bunch of reeds or broken by a ship. Once it travelled through Gallipoli unharmed it had to wind its way through the Aegean Sea, the Greek Islands and then the Mediterranean, before braving the Straits of Gibraltar and the expansive Atlantic Ocean beyond. It probably found its way into a drift down by Africa and across to South America before floating upwards through the Caribbean to Mexico.
“It’s appropriate that the geography teacher was the one who taught her,” I said.
“Maybe it would be more appropriate if it was her history teacher,” Inna replied, “The mexican kids would have been seven or eight when the message floated up. Miriam was only that age when she wrote it; she was sixteen by the time it was answered.”
“Do you know if they’re still in touch?”
“I know she went on holiday to Cancún a few years later. But I think that was more to do with her American boyfriend going on spring break than anything else. I don’t know if she met the family. I hope she did.”
We talked about composing a letter and throwing it in a bottle into the Danube, hoping it would happen across an eligible Cuban or Puerto Rican bachelor, but did not once think to put pen to paper.
