Nach Bayreuth

“Achtung!” we cried as we hurled our suitcases down the long flight of stairs. Annoyed adults turned and looked at us, muttering in German. We giggled in response.

My sister, Meg, and I started down the stairs after all our worldly possessions. Well, not all, but all we deemed necessary for our one year stay in Germany. A short, fat man gave us a piece of his mind but, since we had just used a very large percentage of the German we knew, we were spared knowing what he thought of us. “Sorry, sorry,” we giggled as we passed. Daddy hadn’t taught us the word for sorry yet and our little, yellow German-English dictionaries were in our suitcases at the bottom of the stairs.

We were all going to go to Germany together, of course. Isn’t that how most parents would arrange moving to another country for a year? But at the last minute Daddy had changed his and Johnny’s (our nine year old brother) tickets for three weeks later because he had to get his dentures finished before we left and there just wasn’t enough time. Not that we weren’t in favor of his having teeth -- as it was fairly embarrassing having a father who only had six teeth -- but we wanted to wait longer before we went too. We were both in the throws of one of the best summers of our lives, the summer of 1985, and leaving our friends behind was, to say the least, excruciating. But our tickets were the cheap kind that couldn’t be changed, so off we went on the very last day of August.

It wasn’t until a few days before the trip that Daddy explained that we would land in Frankfurt and have to take two trains to get to Bayreuth, where we would be living. Daddy’s new department secretary at the Universitat Bayreuth would pick us up. She had daughters close to our age. Wouldn’t it be fun? But in the meantime we had to learn enough German to get us two tickets from Frankfurt to Neuremburg and then to Bayreuth. And we’d both be carrying suitcases, large carry on bags and, of course, a box of books each. Daddy couldn’t go to Germany for a year without at least four boxes of books, so it stood to reason that two teenage girls traveling alone in a country where they didn’t know the language would be carrying two of those boxes. Didn’t it?

It actually didn’t occur to us how hard carrying all of this would be until we landed in Frankfurt and got our luggage. By the time we made it to the first train station, we were exhausted. “Do you remember anything about this train station?” I asked.

Meg shook her head. Daddy had said, “But you were in this train station the last time we went to Germany.” But the last time we went to Germany, I was five and Meg was seven. We were on our way to live in Sudan that time and our minds were probably on other things. And now I was fourteen and she was sixteen. Nothing was even remotely familiar. It wasn’t like train stations on Long Island, not that we’d been in that many. This train station was gargantuan. It seemed bigger than Kennedy airport. “Let’s just get the tickets,” Meg said.

So we went to the ticket counter and said the only sentence we knew in German. We practiced it on the plane. “Zwei fahrkharten nach Bayreuth, bitte.” The man behind the counter rattled off something in German and we looked at him blankly. It hadn’t occurred to us that we wouldn’t just be handed two tickets to Bayreuth. Finally, Meg said, “Um… do you speak English?” The man rolled his eyes. “You must to change the train – in Nuremburg, no?” Oh, yeah, that. We knew that. We smiled and nodded. He gave us the tickets muttering something that sounded like “American idiots” but we couldn’t be sure.

The train was on the other side of the Brobdingnagian train station and we felt like two Lilliputians. Germans are very efficient but not known for their escalators or elevators. At least not in 1985. We were confronted with one massive staircase after another even more imposing staircase. That was what finally led us to the decision to stand at the top of the stairs and throw our things down. We knew “Achtung” from Bugs Bunny cartoons and figured all that could really be expected of us was not to hit people with our stuff. But the stairs going up were another matter. Each one seemed to take hours. After years of bike riding we were both pretty strong. Even though I was a fairly large teenager, I was in pretty good shape. But up these staircases was another story. We seriously considered leaving Daddy’s books and claiming they were lost on the plane. But we both realized that these staircases were nothing compared to Daddy’s wrath if we didn’t show up with the books. At least there were more staircases going down.

At last we were on the train. We settled into our comfy red seats and looked out the windows. After a few minutes of riding through what must have been the City of Frankfurt, we were engulfed in a thick blanket trees which were all tall and sumptuous.

“Do you think we’re in the Black Forest?” I asked my sister. She always knew everything. Or she used to – until she started dating, that is. Now it seemed like all she knew was about boys and, frankly, I thought it was a little boring. Not that I didn’t like boys, but there had to be more going on the in the world than boys, especially her boyfriend, Joe. I couldn’t stand him and the feeling was mutual.

“I don’t know.”

I could tell she was annoyed and wanted me to be quiet. The last few years had been strained in our relationship. Our mother died three years earlier and at first we were very close. But as she got more interested in her boyfriends and as it became more and more clear to me that no boy on earth would ever like me, I grew steadily fatter and, to be honest, weirder and we grew apart. I spent all my time with our friends writing my novel furiously in thick notebooks while she was off doing whatever teenage girls do with their boyfriends. I was opposed to the whole trip to Germany and rebelled at every possible moment, and, while she was also opposed, she stayed and helped Daddy pack and get ready. And now we were going to be stuck in Germany for a whole year with only each other. And Johnny, but he was a little kid so he didn’t really count. I sighed.

“Do you have a map?” I asked.

“Judy, don’t you have something to read?”

“You know that makes me carsick.”

“We’re on a train.”

“Well, then train sick. Do you want me puking all over you?” I smiled. “I could.” I made loud retching noises.

“Judy!” But she smiled. There’s nothing like a little scatological humor to lighten the mood.

“Why are we going, again?” I asked when I stopped laughing.

“Because the only other Nilotic researchers in like, the world, are there. Daddy has to go there to write his dictionary.”

“Who writes a dictionary? I mean, what sort of freak decides to write a dictionary?”

“Miriam Webster. Anyway, it’s not a dictionary like that. It’s like… a linguistic dictionary.”

I rolled my eyes. “Why couldn’t we have normal parents? Do you know like anyone whose parents are professors?” Our mother was also a linguist and I often referred to her as though she were still alive.

“David’s Dad is professor.”

David was the son of a professor in our mother's department and had been Meg's first serious boyfriend two years earlier. They were still best friends. “Yeah, and they went on Sabbatical in Hawaii. Where do we go? Sudan and Germany. I think I’d rather go to Hawaii.”

“Well, Daddy also wanted to go to China. We could be going to China. I think Germany is at least a little more like home.”

We looked out the window. It just didn't look like home.