Story Twenty-Six

That time I rode on a boat and nearly witnessed death.

I’m sitting in a bar listening to a woman with what I’d call a flat American accent, the kind that national broadcast journos cultivate, speak to her staff in a mix of English and German and I’m realizing that my accent really isn’t that bad, it’s just that I’ve been too apologetic about it all. She’s talking like a New Yorker at top speed and everyone is just…fine with it? Lord love an assertive woman.

I attract…looks here. People stare at the young woman with the walker. People are familiar with the concept of young people in wheelchairs, and old people with walkers, but I seem to mix up those expectations in a way that makes people uncomfortable. I find that people are very kind; when I get on a bus or a train the entire carriage often moves itself around to find me a seat. But there is a discomfort that I am not used to feeling anywhere else, like I am some kind of unpredictable wild thing that might behave in inexplicable ways, rather than a young-middle-aged woman who just also needs to use this train like everyone else. I have not yet been targeted by thieves, although I have had some folks attempt to talk me into giving them money for services that they certainly weren’t going to provide. But that’s just life as a tourist, when you’re new enough to the city that people can see you looking too closely at your phone map or clearly unfamiliar with things like how the ticket machines work.

The other night I went to a Ukrainian comedy show which was performed in English. It was truly hilarious, in a bleak way. Some of the comedians had clearly typed their set into Google Translate, which led to jokes like “My boyfriend is awful. He never listens to me. We drive places and he doesn’t park correctly. Why are men like this?” which is funny in its awkwardness but it led to a situation in which a bunch of international folks - the audience came from America and Turkey and Ukraine and Japan - all looked around at each other in that wordless way that people in groups of strangers have when confronted by social awkwardness. Should we laugh at what was clearly meant to be a punchline? Do we clap while someone bombs? What is comedy etiquette when someone clearly has the stage presence and the comfort to where you just know that they’re actually very talented, if only they were performing in the language that they know, in the language they can ad lib in, in the language that they clearly miss? How do you laugh at someone struggling in public, someone in a new place with new norms, where even if they spoke fluently some of the jokes would miss? We decided, by the second tortured punchline, that we would laugh. Because that was what this person was doing this for, that’s what our job as a good audience was. There were drinks and other comedians, many of whom had biting and witty commentary in English about things like the war and Putin and being a refugee. But none of them captured the hearts of the audience like that first comic, who got up and just read her jokes off that sheet of paper because nothing, not a war and not a language barrier, would stop her performing.

And of course there was an American woman there, a journalist, sitting in the front row. The emcee was doing crowd work, and in the middle of a comedy show she waxed lyrical about how badly she felt for the plight of Ukrainians. She talked about her work with underprivileged communities. She mentioned what outlets she worked with. I, taking notes in the back row, let out an audible-to-my-neighbors are you fucking kidding me right now, and the people sat next to me clocked that we had similar accents and they also noticed she was older than I was, and they asked if she was my mother. No, I said. But I’m about as embarrassed as if she were. They laughed, and later the bartender (who knew I was also an American journalist) asked me if all Americans act like that. He thought I, tipping well and not talking much about myself, might have been an exception to American journalists. And I might be, but not for those reasons.

I’m more of a memoirist than a reporter anyway; I wear many hats depending on what’s needed but my strength really is watching things and then writing them or taking photos of them or both. Which is how I came to take a boat cruise from Berlin to Potsdam and back. There were castles, and also I learned that there is a small island in one of the lakes which is known to be a retreat for the very wealthy, the kinds of people who value privacy. I have just told you about a comedy show but this boat tour was absolutely funnier. You haven’t heard raw comedy until you’ve heard a pre-recorded German man saying things like “and we are even a little famous, as it is rumored that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt had a house on that island in 2009” when it is 2022 and you are riding on a tourist boat past actual fucking historical landmarks. I have forgotten which of these photos, for example, are of the house that a king’s wayward son built for his underaged mistress, but I learned about that as well.

The bridges are low on the Spree River, and now and again we would hear a recorded message about how you really should duck. One man, of course, once stood up to take a photo and the whole boat was yelling in something that must have sounded like the Tower of Babel for him to get down, after which the aggrieved captain broke into our tour guidance to say very pointedly that he doesn’t like having to pull the boat over to get an ambulance. When, perhaps an hour later, a woman got up to get a selfie of her standing in front of a low bridge and only just sat down before she bashed her own head in, nobody yelled because she was perfectly aware of the danger she was in. But the captain made another announcement that he absolutely would not be pulling this boat over for selfies. Half the passengers didn’t speak German, and you could tell who understood him because those people giggled while everyone else sat doing whatever tourists do on boat cruises.

I asked the waiter about it later, how many times per boat trip does someone almost die, because we were sharing one of the smoking tables on the back deck, and he got that look that service workers do when they’re about to say something about the asshole who always calls in with an order five minutes before close, and he told me that it’s not every time. But he was French, and it’s possible he did say it was every time. I watched it almost happen twice in three hours, so I can extrapolate.

I am enjoying being a tourist, in between the times I’m chasing down this story. I don’t often do things like boat tours or paying to go up a tower. I was invited to go up the TV tower for dinner, which is kind of like the Space Needle or the Empire State Building, but it isn’t retrofitted and there’s no way I’m going to climb ten flights of stairs or however tall it is to eat shitty chicken in a revolving restaurant, so I won’t be getting you night views from the tallest point in Berlin.

With that said, I have spoken to a lot of refugees and I’m not writing about them yet because I don’t know them very well and I haven’t done the research to verify their details, but there is one story they all tell me: they are isolated. From whatever corner of the world, they have left home and come to this place where people just drink all the time and smoke too much and more than one has told me that they are jealous of my walker not because of physical issues but because people here are patient with me and they are not patient with them, these able-bodied people who aren’t tourists but also aren’t locals. They are not home anymore, and that is exciting when you’re young and traveling for pleasure or to learn about the world, but it is less pleasurable when you don’t know when you get to go back to what you know. When you’re in limbo, hoping that some bureaucrat somewhere will let you stay, when you miss your bed and your own shower even if it had shitty water pressure. Even the bathrooms in a new country are a maze of buttons and knobs and plugs that aren’t labeled clearly enough for you to know what they mean.

In the coming weeks, I will have more to say about all this; it is the point of my trip here. But I build stories slowly, and particularly the ones that involve pain. There’s no reason to rush those, I am not reporting on troop movements or human rights violations that need a quick turnaround.

In the meantime: Don’t take selfies of yourself standing under a low bridge, because even the boat captain will only laugh at you. And so will everyone else on the damn boat.