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No Ralph Chilled, at noon, we tucked behind a tree along a stream bank to cut the wind and found it quite pleasant in the sun. We were in Gross Waltersdorf. I wondered if the name was appropriate. The tree we sheltered behind hung with clumps of tiny purple elderberries similar to the ones Mom picked at home and then boiled for hours with loads of sugar. We would taste the result and unanimously announce, "Yick!" Even the birds wouldn't eat them. Eppendorf was the start of the steep hills. Sharon continued to grunt up hills in a major sweat. Her new wheel made a chirping chorus like a group of disconcerted crickets. We passed a horse drawn cart filled with townsfolk. They all laughed and waved. As Arran would have said, "Just making fun wherever we go!" Every time we passed a home the residents laughed and waved. One old fellow on a bike rode with us talking up a storm. He didn't seem to mind we didn't understand a word of what he said. There was a long steep hill into Gorneau where Ralph lived. At the top I stopped to wait for Sharon to catch up. An old woman pointed to my front pannier and asked what was in it. I pulled on my jacket sleeve and pointed to the pannier. She nodded. Sharon crested the hill and unsmilingly pedaled by. In town, we sat on a bus bench with our heads between our knees. Sharon complained it would take a week for her back to stop hurting. Those muscles took extra stress when she pushed too high a gear. The street we were on--Chemnitz-- was the same as Ralph's address. All we needed to do was find his house number. Going to only one wrong house we found it. As we pushed our bikes in through Ralph's backyard gate, three stout old women in gray woolen sweaters, their legs spread wide apart, sat on a comfortable wooden bench. Leaning forward on their canes they eagerly eyed us up. A fourth, younger woman, not corpulent like the bench sisters, cast a wary eye in our direction. It had been over a week since my last shower and I was sporting a week's worth of beard growth. "Ralph," I requested. "Does Ralph Richter live here?" The three old women looked on, not understanding a word of English. The younger woman turned out to be Ralph's mother. She told us Ralph was cycling in Sweden. She called up through the open window to her daughter, Anja. Anja came down from the third floor flat. The house was four stories tall. We explained we had met Ralph in Norway and thought he would be home by now. Kay, Anja's common-law husband, was with her. They both had taken English in school and university. They spoke and understood English well.Anja invited us to stay. I was curious. "Is that going to be okay with your mother?" She satisfied me with, "It doesn't matter--we have our own flat." Many German households had a large house divided into flats. Often the older children still lived in the house, but had their own flat. It was a habitable arrangement. We stowed our bikes in the laundry room, grabbed clean clothes and headed for their new luxurious bathroom. The shower, manufactured with smart doors on the enclosure--two wings slid around in an arced track--rather than a door that swung open and dripped water on the floor after one's shower. Sharon showered while I stuffed our smelly clothes into the washer. Before supper, I gobbled a large piece of cake, made with plums from the tree in the backyard. Six-month old baby Louisa intently stared at me from her table-side bed. "She only looks at the men," Kay said with a grin. Anja's younger sister, Krict, lived in the adjoining two-room flat. Kay and Anja shared the bathroom and kitchen with her. Krict was away for the weekend in Berlin with her boyfriend. Sharon and I slept in Krict's room. It was spotless. Everything perfectly arranged: the stuffed toys adorning her bedspread; her intricately arranged rock crystal collection in the dust-free glass cabinet; her tiny porcelain collection of elephants lined up neatly in a book display-case in the living room. There was an amazing difference in how people kept house. The Germans seemed to be strictly neat freaks. I even noticed our clothes hung on the line in a particular order--first, shirts with all the arms hanging down, then shorts, and finally socks, with the pairs hung fastidiously beside each other. None of: "I'll hang up whatever I happen to pull out of the basket" for them. Even more, the entire nation seemed to have inherited that clean gene. Such an orderly people. They followed rules to the letter. We noticed they had an innate aversion to cross the street against the Don't Walk sign. Arran delighted in astounding crowds of Germans in Berlin who stoically waited on the corner for the walk light (even though not one car was in sight for blocks) by boldly striding across. They would gape at him. Arran loved it--the anarchist in him dying to explode out. What was this younger generation coming to? I saw Arran almost become one with the asphalt several times too. One memorable time jaywalking across four lanes of busy traffic in Berlin. He strutted out there, just daring some driver to pick him off. Another good one was in Copenhagen when he rode his bike across six lanes of traffic against the light. Talk about thrilling. But Arran remembered the highest adrenaline rush was the time Rebecca and he rode in rush hour traffic in downtown Athens, honking their horns and waving their fists at car drivers while yelling, "Ella!" He hooted, "The car drivers loved it and got right into the spectacle, honking and waving their fists out their windows." |
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