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everyone says she's easy
but friends, she's hard as hell
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I felt the music before I actually heard it. When I stepped out of the train station at Cologne, the bass notes broke into my stomach, reverberated through my flesh, as though they were the pulse of my mother, regulating my heartbeat.
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What's the occasion, I shout into Chloede's ear. He shouts something back. I'm pretty sure I hear Oktoberfest.
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It's barely September, I say, confused, and he laughs like I am just the most adorable thing ever. In Germany, he shouts, We like to start Oktoberfest early. But mostly, he confesses, our people just like to drink. As a rural West Texan, I feel I can relate.
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I felt the street crunch against the soles of my shoes, and I saw through a sudden gap in the crowd the street, covered in broken beer bottles, the glass powdering the ground like some kind of unholy snow.
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In the next instant, the gap disappeared under a sea of bodies, their movements staggered and forced as they fought against their suffocating proximity to one another. They danced in slow motion, finishing their drinks and dropping them one by one to the street below, where the glass was ground back into nothing.
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I feel Marlene's hand back on my arm and she points up at the sky. I can just see Cologne Cathedral silhouetted in the dark, forbidding and complex, its spires piercing the darkening night. It strikes me as a pretty good metaphor for the country itself. It's hard to tell whether the architect intended to frighten, impress, or fascinate.
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Germany seems so much more complex than France, her structures, her language, her people. She lets you see her fissures but offers no apology. There is an air of efficiency, of sadness, of beauty and strength and brokenness.
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The men don't stand out much from all the other drunk men I've ever seen, but the women, strong and proud and beautiful, make me avert my eyes. I'm not sure why I find them so frightening, unless it's because they have the unmistakable air of people who have something to hide and want to show you that they could care less.
