Sorry for those of you who have read this a thousand times...The single most valuable skill a traveler can have is the ability to make the best of any and every situation, no matter how awful, annoying, unexpected, or inconvenient. If nothing else, Berlin taught me this. Berlin, a city so enveloped in chaos through the years, proved to be no different for this lonely traveler.
In November of 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Around the same time, the Irish band U2 finished their "Joshua Tree" tour and flew to Berlin to begin recording a new album. The group was on the last commercial flight to Berlin before the unification of East and West Germany. At this extraordinary time in history, these four Irishmen ended up in the U-Bahn station called "Zoo Bahnhof," which had been the gateway to the East when everything was divided by war. The track, "Zoo Station," from the band's "Achtung, baby!" album was inspired by their hectic experience at the Zoo Bahnhof station.
Zoo Station is aptly named, not because it's near a zoo, but rather because it is a zoo. Imagine a mall, train station, subway station, food court, and video arcade in one building, and you have Zoo Station. The lady at the service desk doesn’t understand me when I ask in German if she speaks English, but that's probably because I learned that particular phrase thirty seconds before from the woman next to me in line. She gives me a U-Bahn map and sends me on my way. Subways, regardless of how confusing and illogical they may be, are systems that I understand, so I find my way to the Mocken Bruke stop on the U1 and walk to my hostel.
Berlin is more than anything else an overwhelmingly honest city. It's like everything and nothing I've ever seen before. It's beautiful in its own classic, unafraid, rough-around-the-edges way. It works to keep its streets clean, but when coke bottles find their way to the sidewalks, it isn't ashamed. It says, matter-of-factly, "I am what I am." Berlin. Not perfect, but with a reality that is very appealing. The sidewalk felt solid beneath my feet.
Two hours later I sit down to dinner at Potsdammer Platz. A good friend of mine went to Germany for a year and told me that she survived entirely on cheese and chocolate, and until my dinner plate arrived, I didn't believe her. An hour and more cheese than an entire army could eat later, I understand first-hand what she meant.
There is a keg in the middle of the sidewalk. The head of the Pub Crawl - a British transplant named Tom - is probably the loudest person I've ever met. Everything about him is loud, from his voice to his clothes to the way he walks, confidently, pounding the cobblestones with his scuffed Timberland boots.
"We're going to another pub," Tom yells over the voices, "but before we go another meter, we need to consume at least two liters of vodka!" Out came plastic shot glasses. We look around at each other for a split second, then the crowd erupts in cheers. At the end of the Pub Crawl, I go back to find my friend who drunkenly wandered off, and once I am alone it looks more like a dungeon. The walls are uneven, the edges jagged, and the floors dusty. The air glows an eerie blue as a result of dust and blacklight, and I shiver for reasons completely unrelated to the temperature. My nose itches from the scent of stale smoke and sweat.
I sit down on a bench, put my bag beside me, and start looking for my friend on the dance floor. Reaching for my cell phone in the pocket of my bag, my hand hits the cool leather of the bench instead. Alarmed, I look over, and stare in shock at the empty space where my bag used to be.
Tearing through piles of coats and knocking over mountains of purses, I become more hysterical by the second. A man with a cigar walks up to me and offers me a smoke and I stare at him in disbelief. A girl in a hot pink cropped top offers me some tissue and the rest of her martini, and I took the tissue, not the drink.
The owner of the club emerges from a dimly-lit back room and looked at me disapprovingly. "You dumb, drunk American kid," he says in a thick, almost indiscernible German accent, and I nearly choke on my tears. "I'm not dumb," I said meekly, "I'm not drunk, and I'm not a kid. I just need to find my stuff." I barely got the words out.
"Go home, it is not here," he snarled. I felt the brick wall behind me and slowly sank to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably for the first time in years. A new song came on that was ten times louder than the last, and my thoughts struggled to find their way through the jungle of sounds. I made a mental list of my losses: camera, memory card, shirt, money, cards, IDs, passport, eurail pass, U-Bahn pass, bag, U2 patch sewn on bag. Then I had a thought. I haven't checked the men's bathroom yet. With a renewed sense of hope, I walked towards it.
He intercepted me three feet from the door. Huge and broad, he was clearly inebriated, but that didn’t stop him from pushing me up against a wall and knocking my head on the bricks.
"Oh sweetie, why you goin' in there? You want some of this, huh?" He pressed a hairy forearm against my neck and pointed at his crotch, and from a combination of airway obstruction and sheer horror, I gaged. I tried to wiggle out of his grip but he stood firm, braced in his sick, drunken glory against the adjacent wall. Looking frantically around, I saw no one with any semblance of authority, and the club-goers didn’t seem to notice.
I tried to wiggle a leg free to kick him in the obvious destination, but one foot remained jammed underneath his shoe and the other was stuck between a table and a wall. Pinned up against the wall, I frantically tried to figure out how I was going to get out of this situation, when he jammed his other hand down my pants. Simultaneously, I saw a navy blue billfold on the floor of the men's bathroom and switched into survival mode. I stopped struggling, and he looked at me curiously. "You like that, huh?" I threw my arms around his waist and pulled him towards me. He was too surprised to react, and too drunk to guess my next move as I kicked him so hard that he flipped over backwards and my thigh hurt on impact.
Limping into the men's bathroom I snatched the billfold off the floor. It was empty except for the innermost pocket, and by this point I was too tired to pray. I reached in to find my passport and red emergency card and in a moment of sheer bliss sank to the filthy bathroom floor.
At night, the streets of Berlin are nasty, not as in dirty, but as in mean. They're angry, and regardless of what you did to piss them off, you better pray they forgive you long enough to get home. Since my coat was stolen too, I rub my arms and run through East Berlin, humming random melodies in my head in attempt to block out the evil growls of the streets. I have no idea where I am, but I'm too petrified to ask for directions, so I wander around for an hour before I find a U-Bahn station buried in a mass of angular concrete. I'm so cold that I actually throw up outside the entrance, my cheese dinner glowing an uneasy off-white color on the frozen dirt. Dizzy, I lay down next to my regurgitated 10 euro meal and think things over.
My sweater gets thinner and thinner until there's barely anything between my bruised body and the cold dirt. I pull myself to my feet and walk slowly into the u-bahn station, a shell of a human being in a torn black top and ripped jeans. An old man working at a little shop inside the station puts his arm on my shoulder and leads me into the tiny store. He doesn't speak a word of English and I don't speak a word of German, but somehow he knows. He sits me down on a metal chair, takes off his coat, puts it around my shoulders, and disappears only to return with hot cocoa and a tomato mozzarella baguette. I cry. Not the tears of fear I cried in the club, but the slow, rhythmic tears that you cry when the reality of the situation sets in. For some reason I tell him the entire story, even though I know he doesn't understand me, and he knows that I know, but it helps, somehow. He hugs me and whispers, "it ok, it ok," and at first I'm more hysterical than I was to begin with, because after being so violated, sometimes compassion is harder to handle.
"Where are you going?" he asks, six feet tall with a face I can't remember but a voice I can't forget, smooth and kind, unassuming and clear. "Can I help you at all, are you okay?" I'm so tired. The subway roars into the station and I hear Zoo Station in my head, “I’m ready, ready for the crush,” coursing through my barely-conscious mind. He shakes me awake when it's my stop, and as I walk away from the train I realize he stayed on ten stops too long to make sure I got off okay. And I will be okay. Because for every awful person I encounter in Berlin, there are at least three people who show me such kindness, for nothing in return, just because they see that I am in need.
Six hours later the Australians in my room comfort me. They call the police and bring me to the front desk, where the hotel staff arranges a makeshift meal for me. The cops won’t give me a copy of the police report, despite my hiccupping sobs and Chester’s fierce-sounding German over the phone.
I’ve lost everything but my passport, and apparently to get the money my father wired me, I have to journey to a remote airport at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning, because tomorrow’s Sunday, and nothing else is opened. I can’t shower, change clothes, take out my contacts, or even read because my stuff is padlocked in a locker next to my bed, and the key was stolen too. It’s the last straw.
Sometimes you laugh at yourself. Sometimes you laugh at the situation. Sometimes you laugh so hard you cry. And sometimes you laugh because you can’t cry anymore. Because you refuse to. And I can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard. I thanked whoever, wherever for the fact that I was okay, laughed some more, and went to sleep. Because when you think about it, it really is pretty funny. I may have lost almost everything, but I’ll always have the image of my three Australian bunkmates singing up a storm in the middle of the night trying to break my lock open with a crowbar.
The airport money gram isn’t the right place to go of course, because this is just my weekend of course. I go to board the S-Bahn back to Zoo Station when the Berlin police decide to check me of all people at all times for a valid ticket. Minutes later I’m in handcuffs, and no one understands my protests that I filed a police report and that I was robbed. One says, “No policeman named Rob!” and growls at me. I end up on the sidewalk. They won’t let me get back on the S-Bahn. I have not one cent to my name. And I can’t get to Zoo to pick up the money my Dad wired me to get home.
A woman glares at me and I wonder why but I look around and it’s clear enough. I’m slouched on a dirty sidewalk outside airport Shonefeld, and the tattered buildings are nothing compared to my haggard appearance. She thinks I’m homeless. And right before I hit rock bottom, I smile at the cigarette butts next to me on the sidewalk.
A man tosses an empty coffee cup on the street and I grab it. I sit for ten minutes and nothing happens, so I lean back and zone out. I wonder, what skills do I have that could help me in this situation? And in a daze of exhaustion, frustration, hysteria, depression, and confusion, it comes to me. I remember all the years of voice coaching, choral groups, and musicals. And I sing.
I sang U2 songs at first, “Where the streets have no name” and “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for,” among others. Anything I could remember the words to. I thought about my parents, so I sang Les Miserables, and I thought about home, so I sang acapella. I sang and sang and somewhere in all the songs I started to feel better. I called out in a clear, hopeful alto. And halfway through U2’s greatest hits, I had enough money for my S-Bahn fare. But I sang a little bit more, on my street corner in Berlin. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to.
It’s odd the clarity of mind that comes from a moment like singing for change on a street corner in Berlin. But if you can get through that, you can get through anything.
