Non-fiction / The Quelle (Analysis)

THE QUELLE

The water bubbled up from some depth deep inside a Quelle, which gurgled warm healing water. The rectangular pool, with it’s blue and white tiles and bubbling fountain were all a fascade. The water hissed out like a snake and in the gracious cool rain, it steamed.  The trip to Bad Homburg could be written up in the ugly American style guide, as a bumbling attempt to fit in.  I had planned the trip for a month, but it was my first foray out in Germany alone.  My attempts to buy a ticket in rudimentary gestures and broken German would bring a deaf and blind person to tears of laughter.  I managed to get my destination across to the clerk after several minutes. “Bad Homburg, Taunus” I said, knowing, at the bare minimum, my destination. The weather shuffled and dealt sun, wind, and  rain, intermittently throughout the afternoon. On the train, I decided to get something to eat at a stop along the spa route.  I got off at Bad Shonborn and I had half an hour until the next train. I ordered a Radler and sat at a booth that seemed as if had not been changed since World War II. The décor was wood on wood, heavy slabs of dark mahogany tables pushed so close to the wooden benches that they indented the forearms while thin cushions seemed intent on irritating the derriere. The cavernous kitchen was in the back room behind the bar.
After five minutes I remind the bartender of my Radler and he pats the air downward with his hand and tells me, “no rush, we don’t rush here”.
“Okay, I say. I can see you’re so busy.” Then I remembered he probably doesn’t speak English and so in german I said “Du bist beschaftig” which means the same thing I hoped and feeling a little culture conscious because I used the informal Du which can be construed as an insult, I smiled as nicely as I could.  I always struggle not to be the ugly Burger King American.  Although, the restaurant is in the train station it doesn’t see its service as being fast but being able to move as slowly as possible, to slow time down until it ceases to exist.  He slaps a dishtowel over his left shoulder and brings my Radler and I realize that I’m going to miss my train because I’ve ordered the only thing I recognize on the menu. The schnitzel and even though it is listed Scnitzel with  brotchen, it is not a sandwich and Schnitzel in a restaurant will not suffer the indignity of being stuff ed inside a brotchen, because it is always as large or larger than the plate. The waiter is a lean man in an apron. The cook is shorter but carries the same bemused look on his face as I try to figure out how I’m going to eat a schnitzel quickly.  I do a deep breathing exercise remind myself that I’m on vacation and there is no need to hurry and so I start reading my book, “How to live with Grace”,  and light a cigarette thankful that I can at least smoke. Twenty minutes later my schnitzel comes and I can either stuff it in my mouth and chew it on the train or just relax and so I decide to relax. I don’t even bother to look at the clock as I cut off a small piece of schnitzel and gracefully put it in my mouth.  

It takes me about three hours to get to Taunus when it should have taken twp, but I’ve learned another important cultural lesson to slow down or to not eat, those are the only choices.  They say your culture is invisible unless you leave it and experience a new culture and then you will see how to tell the difference between you and the other.   You can stand out in at least twenty different ways from the way you dress, to the way you hold your fork, but some of those ways you may have been trained to forget like your skin.
I’m at the spa.  The catch is that everyone is naked. I’m wearing a bathing suit and a towel and I may as well be dressed for a polar expedition.  I agree to come out of my bathing suit in the women’s sauna and laugh at myself for being so conservative, just as a workman in a baggy orange jumpsuit, like they where in American prisons comes in to check the temperature of the saunas. A monk couldn’t match my concentration on the cedar board above my head.  After that I dart between saunas quickly trying not to be seen by the workmen.  They seem to be everywhere but I’m starting to relax and I no longer care if a stranger sees me naked if it’s only for thirty seconds, but still I stare straight ahead choosing to be seen rather than to see. I have to admit when they appeared in the bathroom, talking loudly, I stopped peeing, and stayed  hidden naked in the stall until they left. An awkward moment that I can now laugh about. Afterwards I showered and change back into my bathing suit. I seemed to be the only person overly concerned with decorum, everywhere I turned there was a naked man or woman or child.  I slowly walked, my eyes down, my towel half draped around my waist, so as not to startle them, by running with my towel over my head.  They look at me as if I’m unnatural and I may well be. I mean I’m an African American woman in a red bathing suit in a room full of naked Germans. I manage to get down to the level which is for people in bathing suits.  The people in bathing suits look at me as if I’m naked and I feel a little self concious. I wonder will people get out of the bath now that I’ve arrived, escaping like there’s a turd in the water. Maybe, I’m too self conscious, I know they have seen black people before I’m not the first.  I travel the route from bath to bath, sauna to sauna with names like venus and mental power every 15 minutes. Sometimes it’s hard to stay in only one, the warm scent of jasmine or patchouli in the warm wood and the dry heat, focuses me mentally.  It’s easy to feel welcomed, and less self-concious, lying on a message table.   Soon,  I am feeling liberated from my skin and I bravely decide to go to the bar for a drink. The bar is in the naked area so I pull off my swim suit, tie my towel as tight as a tourniquet and go have a glass of wine.  I walk through the various- sized bodies as if I’m looking at the emperors new clothes and then I’m lying under the infrared lights enjoying myself as snug as if I was fitted for this life.  
I told the cab driver on the way to the hotel, when he asks me where I’m from and offers me Nigeria. that I am from America.  My family has been in America for three generations.  I don’t know if it matters I’m sure Africans hate being confused for Americans even more, there roots connected to the soil from which they sprung. I am a permanent resident in my homeland. I am like a organ transplant whose original origins have almost been completely erased. In America I am almost invisible as anything but American to the naked eye.  In Germany I am not.
I’m in a smoking room at the Mercure Hotel and I’m pleased a punch, to be smoking, in my room as you can only do in Europe.  Only I gag at the smell because the walls and drapes hold smoke and I can barely breath because I’m used to smoking outside, so as much as I love smoking I’m not used to the smell of it any longer.  Trapped in the cigarette air, I don’t give in, I just open the window and light up. I am a committed smoker and sit down at my computer happily lighting up until I decide I need caffeine. I go across the street to the gas station for two cups of coffee because there is no such thing as a large coffee in Germany and it probably will never have the Big Gulp, which is big enough to drink from for at least two hours, I think wistfully. I try not to compare Germany and America because they are so different beneath the skin. Germany only recently got the “to go” cup and although they like some of the convenience of America they aren’t swallowing everything. That’s why Wal-mart had to pack up and go.
After three exciting half-days spent in the spa, I’m headed to the train station and there is my train with four minutes to go before it leaves another German test.  Yesterday the ticket machine was broken so I don’t bother. I can get on the train, there is no turnstyle to bar my way. In America you wouldn’t be allowed to get on the train without a ticket because you wouldn’t be able to get through a physical barrier which serves to slow you down.   I put my bags in two seats and two nuns get on the train and one of them doesn’t like traveling backwards so I try to make room for her next to my bags but she decides to sit in another seat.  The other Nun takes the seat that is empty across from me. We’re headed into Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, when two ticket agents get on the train at Frankfurt Messe and I suddenly remember that I don’t have a ticket.  The nun doesn’t have a ticket either.  Somehow the agent directs her attention on me and offers to sell me a ticket as she calls another agent over. I tell her the story about the broken machine and how I thought there was a ticket machine on the train, she’s shaking her head and everything says she understands but then she asks for my passport.  The other agent starts typing on his computer and we’re at the main station where we all get off together. They hand me a forty dollar ticket which she explains to me is not a ticket. I don’t know that the German word is not ticket, but I don’t know what it is, so  I ask “Do I have to pay this?” Then I ask again if she speaks a little English, although we have been speaking English the whole time. She says if my story is true about the broken ticket machine then I won’t have to pay as she hands me the thing which isn’t a ticket.  I want to ask why the nun didn’t get one too, but it seems selfish and terrible of me to question such a thing.  This thing is tentative, this hospitality, this trust.  I say okay and go upstairs to catch the I.C.E. I’m so disconcerted that I have a double of some kind of cognac and the bartender tells me he will sell it to me for five euros, “for you, five euros” he says. In the U.S. the price would be fixed, without flexibility. Amrica is a country where everyone is touted to be treated with the same, anonymous hospitality, one that has a script.  I feel I am beginning to understand this awkward embrace I have with the German people where every interaction is uncharted territory that gets under the skin.

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