MANNHEIM STATION

I recently passed through Mannheim Station and remembered a conversation I had not long ago about this railroad hub as well as the many times I arrived or passed through this station.

At Mannheim Station the world shrinks and expands, distance is relative to who we are. Decades ago, this station seemed a gateway to the world: tracks and dandelion, signal lights and switches; the teacher’s command to walk in pairs, to not get lost; brakes screeching. It was the entry point back into safety, the local train across the platform, stale smoke in compartment wagons with brown and orange plush, summer skies heavy with dark-gray clouds behind the water tower. Our teacher pulled down the window, we fell asleep, uneaten apple slices in checkered knapsacks. Almost 10.000 kilometers from Mannheim Hauptbahnhof, a father talks with me about this railroad hub connecting east and west— or north and south— for a moment, he is not sure and I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, we share excitement for this port on the Rhine, cargo ships and alphabet streets, this bombed-out workmen’s city, rebuilt ugly and confusing, with grand parks, green swimming holes. I want to mention that my father wrote his dissertation there and rode his Vespa through humid nights but then I don’t, nor do I say I have a friend whose grandmother fled Mannheim as a child and that she looks like a local girl, girls I sat in classrooms with; nor that I wish my host could have changed trains there, too, after a field trip, on a visit to his parents, if this were possible; it’s not, he would not be this man in California, weaving a map of Germany while his mother and his son observe in silence. I don’t say that like him, like me, his son, my friend would not exist; we came to life because others were forced in all directions, nor that I wish I could remain, talking, weaving, sheltered by two large candles behind me, in his house where his family has lived 35 years and some, nor that I wish I was a child again, a child who never left, who followed the command to walk in pairs, a girl who knows she’s almost home when she arrives at Mannheim Station.