Main Stuttgart Railway, RE 3603 Departure: Plochingen 7.05
I can see, a memory, the relentless reflection of moon on their faces and hands. They had to time their sprints with the obscuring movement of the the clouds. A mother and father took turns carrying their young child, Gerald Freund, across the flat mud and clay field. When the clouds shifted, the dead-pale moonlight struck them. Women, men, children sprawled across the ground, covered their hands and faces, until the clouds moved, again, and brought darkness. Those were the times when East Germany bled with refugees, before the Wall rose and fell.

Smoke from the departing Plochingen train swirled around platform thirteen. I wondered if Gerald Freund, since I’d been thinking of him, waited on the platform with his newspaper; how long before his train would arrive? An hour? Any second? 41 minutes. What would be on his mind? Last night. He had accidentally run the old 16 millimeter movie, the wrong one, even, backward: from present to past, from train station to entertaining guests late last night in his living room, from west to east, from espresso to heavy gin, from the wall, once high, now fallen, to demonstrations and tanks, separated to married, man to child. From, GDR state and party leader, Walter Ulbricht’s action: sealed off West Berlin; built the Wall, and Gerald’s family’s preemptive flight past midnight.

At least it is a possibility that I could see him as I sat in the café across the street. I rubbed my moist fingertips into my napkin, then examined my fingernails and tried to lose my thoughts in the café’s rumbling conversations and clinging clanging glasses.

  

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