7 things about today

1.     I got on the wrong train in Dortmund, but of course I didn’t know that yet, I thought it was the right train until finally, finally, I panicked when I realized I was heading east instead of north, far far east, too far, back in the direction of the train I’d taken just two days ago, to Leipzig, and here I was again. Again. Fucking trains in Germany. Fucking trains heading in the wrong direction, taking me where I don’t want to go.

 

2.     I get off at Magdeburg, and run to the information booth, to explain that the conductor hadn’t even checked my ticket to tell me I was on the wrong train. He just stamped it and let me keep going in the wrong direction. You took the wrong train, she says. It was a mistake, I say. You weren’t allowed on that train anyway, she says, You had a special ticket. Why didn’t the conductor tell me to get off? Why? I don’t know, she says. You have to buy a new ticket now, she says.

 

3.     I go to the ticket bureau for a new ticket, for a trip that will take me another 3 and a half hours. Instead of a 3 hour trip to Hamburg, I’m now taking an 8 hour trip to Hamburg. I want to cry and I want to blame someone else (that fucking conductor, for instance) but really it’s my fault. I fucked up. I was so confident about being on time for my train, getting into my reserved seat, and feeling a bit (a bit) of relief where the pinched nerve has been pinching the fuck out of my back and shoulder and arm for days. Pinched nerve! I’ve never even had a pinched nerve, but now I have one, and it’s too fucking perfect for a metaphor.

 

4.     The very first time I was on a train in Germany, by myself, more than 40 years ago, the train was accidentally shunted onto the wrong track in the middle of the night and came to a screeching stop at the edge of the North Sea. I heard terrifying shouting German voices and saw men in uniforms, and I didn’t know what to do except wait for someone to tell me it would be all right, the train would back up and turn around. When the train finally stopped in Hamburg, I didn’t get off. I was too afraid. It took me another year to make a return trip with my father.

 

5.     The ticket seller has a kind face. She tried to fine me a cheaper ticket but I need the expensive one because I’m supposed to be on stage this evening, and I need to arrive before it’s too late. I’m supposed to read my poems about my father, and about Hamburg, about the past and the present. She hands me back my old ticket, the one I should have used for the right train, and she says You can keep it as a souvenir. I smile and sigh. You have no idea, I say. Souvenirs. I say to her: My father was born in Hamburg and was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and I’m his daughter, going there to give a presentation about this history. I start to cry. Her face softens even more than it already was. I’m sorry, she says. I’m sorry for everything. Thank you, I say. I love you, she says.

 

6.     When my father and his younger brother were deported from Hamburg to Buchenwald, they were placed on a train that took them all the way south and east to Weimar. Then they were transferred to a cattle car which brought them to the concentration camp. When they arrived, my father said, This is the wrong place, we aren’t supposed to be here. This is the only place there is, someone said.

 

7.     The first time I wrote a book about all of this, I called it Souvenirs and Silences. It was a poetry collection disguised as a memoir disguised as a novel. I was in an MFA program at UCI, thinking I was supposed to write fiction, which meant I was supposed to disguise and reinvent the puzzle of my life as though it wasn’t mine at all. I thought that was my job as a writer, to tell made-up stories about things that never really happened. It took me a long time to realize that my job is actually the opposite of that. My job is simply to tell the truth.