Mein Kind - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by David Applefield

"Mein Kind, "a personal story about stopping a German train, is also about survival. This was perhaps one of the most empowering experiences in my life. And, aside from having nearly killed myself from self-inflicted overdose of adrenaline, the experience has become a kind of internal icon for gaging the realm of possibility. Don't give up. Don't even entertain the question. Few bits of personal philosophy have been more helpful to me as a writer and literary publisher than that: Don't give up. Stop the train, climb aboard, and keep moving.

It was Sunday afternoon and the sign at the Sixt car rental booth directed customers to a parking lot two kilometers away in Nordwest Frankfurt. Twenty minutes earlier I had dropped off our four-year-old son and his mom in front of the station, agreed to meet them in our assigned seats aboard, and sped away in annoyance. There was the lot. I flipped the keys into the red box, checked the time on my grandfather's Omega, and rushed out into the nearly deserted German road with my thumb dangling nervously for a ride back to the station. The fear of missing the train shook in my stomach. A guy with two-tone hair in a revved-up Ford Escort with Finnish plates pulled over, and I ducked into the passenger seat. He lowered the volume of the Led Zeppelin tape as I tried to ask with controlled urgency, "Hauptbahnhof, can you take me that way? I'm going to miss it, my train."

"What time?"

"4:54."

The driver turned up the music and accelerated with moral conviction as if he were at the helm of the Batmobile. "We will see," he added, in one of those slow, gravelly voices which live in the throats of so many Nordic men, Europe's masters of dramatic unexcitement. We sped on.

At the blinking Halt sign by the side of the station, I thanked him and dashed past the patient line of identical, tan-toned taxis, Mercedes with their windshield wipers up, each capped driver rubbing an already clean hood with a beige chamois cloth. With nothing to do, you can always clean again. In Germany, cleaning is an avenue to heaven.

It was going to be close. Without slowing down I dodged luggage carts and wurst stands like a broken field runner, spotting on the electronic board above "Paris, Gare de l'Est, 16:54 Gleich 9." Panicked. I glanced up at the big yellow hand on the God-like clock beneath the roof of the Hauptbahnhof just as the thick steel big-hand advanced one minute: 4:53 then 4:54. And cantered in a frenzy through the chilly station toward Track 9. Nine, nine, nein. Longer strides entered my legs as Gleich 4 and 5, the train to Darmstadt, 6 and 7, passed, and a man with a dark cane stepped out of my way.

The Deutsch Bundesbahn logo, white on metallic grey and green went blurry on Gleich 9 as the train doors shut. The long, chalky whistle accompanied the harsh, clunky locking sound of forged steel clamping down. The sound of precision engineering. On time. Leaving. Breath, my breath, ladened with panic, rushed into my chest as I steered past the massive bumper at the head of Gleich 9. The train, now disengaged, was moving. Moving slowly, the muscle of the engine pulled, gaining deliberate momentum. Inertia. It was leaving. I had missed it. But then I bolted. Along the train, I ran, catching up with the last car and steadying alongside until I was even with the departing mass.

I looked up. There, in the thick window of the door, a DB conductor stood squarely in dark blue beneath a squarish hat, a leather-covered book tucked under his arm like a Bible, a tight necktie held in place with a Mickey Mouse tie tack, winking.

"Hey," I motioned, my feet moving faster. I wanted up. "Hey, c'mon, open. Open. I can make it." A finger rose, shaking, pivoting like a metronome set on largo, a finger that was saying, "Ne, ne, tisskk. You are too late. You should have come earlier. This train has left." I, hestitating in a terrible moment of eternity, disbelief, defeat, under my breath muttered, "No, it's here. I'm here." And then, like a heart with a bad murmur, I bolted faster as the massive, timed machine gained fluidity and slid faster toward the open end of the echoey hooded station like so many trains over the century. Darmstadt. Munich. Babenhausen. The Polish border. Berlin. There are other names I can't mention. My pace stayed even with the now-faster car and the conductor's face and the grinning Mickey. The head of the man seemed to shake forever, driven by principle, enforcing a lesson. He was right. The train had left. It served me right.

"Don't stop," I told myself. "Stop this train." I panted, quickening my pace, and began slapping the side of the metal as if trying to hold on, slow it down with my will. My ring, the one my mother had saved from the war, knocked against the forged siding.

"My child is on this train," I cried out in German. "Mein Kind ist am Zug," came crying from my mouth. My child is on board. Mein Kind. The palm of my hand stung from where it met the cold steel. Pain came with the muffled thud of flesh. My hand moved to the window and slapped harder. "Mein Kind, someone, stop, let me on." Hitting harder, yelling louder, almost frantic, I persisted beyond reason.