by Dora Heldt
“Do you really have to take so much stuff with you? You’ll only need a pair of jeans and a rain jacket on the island.”
Without answering, I rearranged everything once more, put the basket in front of it all, and then asked Dorothea where our jackets were. She went to get them while I pushed against the basket as hard as I could without breaking it. Dorothea came back with two rain jackets, two coats, and three bottles of wine.
“For Marleen.”
I stuffed first the bottles and then the jackets into the gaps, then carefully tried to close the trunk. I succeeded, but with less than an inch to spare. I turned around proudly.
“Well?”
“You forgot a travel bag.”
“No, Dad, I didn’t. That one’s going on the backseat. There’s enough room.”
“Well, I’m not sitting in the back.”
“Fine, you don’t have to. I’ll sit in the back.”
“If Dorothea brakes sharply, the bag will go right into my back.”
“Heinz, I don’t brake sharply,” Dorothea said, “and besides, we can put the bag on the other side of the back-seat. Then I’ll get it in my back.”
“Good.” My father seemed reassured. He looked at his watch. “All that took over half an hour. If you don’t pack cars very often you get out of practice. I used to be unbelievably quick at it when my hip was still okay and when we used to go away all the time. Come on, let’s all make one last trip to the bathroom and then we can set off.”
He went into the house. Dorothea followed him, smiling. I leaned against the car and lit a cigarette, pushing away the thought that my father would have a heart attack if he saw me smoking. I was already too exhausted to care.
The Island
* * *
A good half hour later we crossed the Elbe Bridge. My father was staring fixedly at the street map on his lap. Firstly, because he trusted neither Dorothea’s navigation system nor my sense of direction, and secondly, because he hoped his stubborn silence would serve as a punishment for my smoking. Fine by me. I gazed out the window, looking forward to seeing the North Sea. Dorothea hummed along softly to pop songs on the radio. I pushed the travel bag to the side a little and leaned forward.
“Dorothea, do you have any mints in the glove compartment?”
“I think so. Heinz, can you look please?”
“Oh no,” he said, “you don’t have a sore throat, do you? I wonder where that came from? Mints won’t help damage caused by smoking. You’ll need much more than mints to deal with the kind of problems that…”
“Heinz,” Dorothea said.
“Dad,” I said.
“Yes, yes, you’d be amazed. Well, go ahead and smoke yourselves to death then, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He opened the glove compartment, which smacked down onto his knees. My father shouted out, making Dorothea jump.
“Good God, Heinz, I almost drove into the divider. What’s wrong?”
“This stupid glove compartment fell right on my knees. It really hurts, and it’s all because she had to have a smoke.”
He reached for the rearview mirror and turned it around to give me a reproachful look.
Dorothea turned the mirror back around to the correct position. “Turn around if you want to look at her; you can’t just mess up the position of my mirror like that.”
Heinz looked at her. “I can hardly move. The seat is so far forward, and all because the trunk is too full.”
“Dad, you’re very welcome to sit back here if you want.”
“No, I can’t. I get sick if I sit in the back. How much longer do we have to go?”
I rolled my eyes, but he didn’t notice. “About two and a half hours.”
“That long? For heaven’s sake. That’s no good for my hip. We’ll have to stop so I can stretch my legs.” He leaned forward to have a closer look at the car radio. “What kind of station is this?”
The station was playing an old Fleetwood Mac song.
“This crazy music drives me up the wall. Where’s NDR?” he asked. I groaned, fearing the schmaltzy station that served as a soundtrack for my childhood.
Without asking, he pressed his finger on the tuning button and turned up the volume. I feared the worst. And it happened. The lyrics “Climb into the dream boat tonight” came blasting out at full volume.
“That’s just the ticket.” My father gave Dorothea a nudge and sang along, delighted. Dorothea gave me a horrified look in the rearview mirror.
“What on earth is this?” she asked.
“Dream boat tonight, la la la. It’s by Costa Cordalis. A beautiful song. And so fitting. Although, we’ll be getting on board sooner than tonight and the ferry isn’t exactly going to be a dream boat. But, at least it’s real music, right Christine?”
He swayed his knees back and forth, while I laid my head on the window and closed my eyes.
After an hour more of cheesy ballads, Dorothea turned in to a rest stop, her shoulders tense. She parked in front of a gas pump and turned the engine off. Silence. The radio was off, and all we could hear was Heinz, singing to the end of the song with all of his might, his eyes closed. Dorothea and I looked first at each other, then at him. He opened his eyes and smiled.
“That one was by Renate Kern. An incredible woman. Not that pretty a face, mind, but tremendous all the same. She had some great hits. Back in the day.” He unbuckled his seat belt and opened the door. “So, girls, let the man fill up the gas, you stay sitting down for a minute, and then we can have a nice cup of coffee. Don’t drive away, now.” He climbed out and shut the door behind him.
Dorothea turned around. “You should have warned me. I’d have broken the radio or something. I mean, he knows the words to every song. Since when was your father so obsessed with all that cheesy Schlager music?”
“Oh, since forever.” I didn’t tell her I knew all the words, too. Whether the vocalist was Monica Morell or Bernd Clüver, I knew them all. I’d spent every Sunday from when I was ten till I was sixteen recording the German Schlager music station on my tape recorder. My parents liked throwing parties back then, so the sideboard in the dining room would be turned into a buffet at every opportunity, the carpet rolled up, the lighting dimmed. Guests would drink strawberry punch and beer, eat pasta salad, and then dance the night away. The audiotapes lasted sixty minutes each, so it was my job to have at least five different ones on hand. At one point or another, I must have recorded every single Schlager hit aired. From Renate and Werner Leismann to Christian Anders and Dorthe Kollo to exotic foreigners like Andrea Andergast and Hoffmann & Hoffmann. Every last one of them. The secret was creating playlists in different orders and pressing the pause button at just the right moment, before the traffic report cut in. Over those six years, I developed a polished technique. My compilations were perfect. Volume, pauses, transition from one song to the next, everything was spot-on. My sister recorded just one cassette, when I was on a class trip and she had to stand in for me. At the party, held to celebrate my mother’s getting a new bike, my father realized for the first time that news reports aired every half hour on NDR 2. None of the guests minded the breaks to their dancing, but they did drink a lot more than usual.
Some years ago my father had sorted through all the old Schlager cassettes. Afterward, he called to tell me that he found it really fascinating to listen to all the old news again, and that it was a shame that I’d only been interested in the music back then.
“Christine, what are you humming?”
Dorothea’s voice pulled me from my thoughts. I tried to push the melody of one of the old hits from my head.
“Oh, nothing. Where did the Schlager King go?”
I couldn’t get the tune out of my head; it was only silenced by Heinz, whistling a different one as he sat back down in the passenger seat.
“So, ladies, the car’s full of gas and the bill’s paid. Now I need a little break.”
He directed Dorothea to a parking space in front of th
e service area. As we got out, he looked at me.
“What’s up? You look so pale.”
My thoughts were overtaken by long-forgotten names and lyrics, Schlager countdowns, and old-school tape recorders. I could sing all the Howard Carpendale songs off by heart right this minute. I’d thought that was all behind me. What a Schlager princess.
“Dad, please let’s listen to some different music next. Or nothing at all. Anything but those stupid Schlager songs.”
“What’s up with you? You used to like them. There was a time when you knew them all by heart.”
I fled from Dorothea’s bewildered face and went off to the bathroom.
When I came back, my father and Dorothea were standing in front of the food display. Dorothea looked at me with mock earnestness. “So your favorite singer was Wencke Myhre? That shows just how little you know someone.” She giggled.
“I was eleven.” I reached past her to take a tray from the counter.
My father shook his head. “No, no, it was for much longer than that. Didn’t you already have your driver’s license?”
“Nonsense. I was twelve at the most. And I only did it for your stupid parties. Do you know what you’re going to have to eat?”
One of the service ladies looked at us expectantly. My father gave her a friendly nod.
“I’m sure you already had your license. Hmm, what do I want to eat? What’s that there at the back?”
“That’s meat loaf. We serve it with scrambled egg and bread.”
“Is the meat old?”
“Dad.”
“Heinz.”
The service lady glared at him. “Of course not. But you don’t have to eat it if you don’t want it.”
“I know. But you have to ask nowadays. The old meat has to get used up somehow.”
She looked cross. My father smiled. “No offense. So, what are you girls having?”
Dorothea gave him a look, then ordered three cheese rolls and three cups of coffee.
My father nodded. As he saw the rolls, which were stuffed with lettuce, pickle, and tomato, he said, “That salad looks strange somehow. It’s a cheese roll—why do they have to put greenery in it?”
I reached for his plate, put it on the tray, and gave the service lady an apologetic smile. She stared back icily.
At the register, my father insisted on paying for everything. Which also gave him the right to offer his opinion on the pricing policies of highway rest stops. By the time he was finished, the cashier looked icy, too.
We sat down at the table nearest the back. Heinz opened up his roll, picked out the salad leaf, along with the tomato and pickle, and started to eat. Chewing, he looked from one of us to the other.
“The salad won’t be fresh, you know. I read about it somewhere once. You have to take care, with the contamination and everything.”
Dorothea salted her slice of tomato and popped it in her mouth.
“Oh, Heinz,” she said.
He gave her hand an encouraging pat.
“It’s okay, old meat is worse.”
The rest of the stop was uneventful. I managed to restrain myself from having a cigarette, my father bought a newspaper, Dorothea a magazine. I sat down behind the wheel and belted myself in. As I turned on the engine, my father gripped the door handle tightly and looked frantically past me. “That Mercedes behind you is pulling out.”
“Yes, Dad, I can see that.”
I steered onto the on-ramp to the highway, sped up, and went up a gear.
“Don’t you double declutch?”
“Dad, that was thirty years ago, with the old gearboxes. There’s no need now.”
“It protects the engine.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“Hmm…and don’t you ever use your signal?”
Dorothea laughed but said nothing as I merged and adjusted the rearview mirror.
“Christine, you’re supposed to do that before you set off. You should be paying attention to the road.”
“Dad, just read your newspaper.”
He leaned over to me to see the speedometer, then braced himself, his hand against the console.
“Eighty-five? Why are you going so fast?”
Dorothea put a calming hand on my shoulder.
“Heinz, we were going that quickly the whole time.”
“But Christine’s driving a car she’s not familiar with. It only takes seconds to overturn. I think you should keep a bit more distance; that bus is going to swing out.”
“Dad, it’s fine. I’ve had my license for twenty-seven years and I’ve never had an accident. Besides, I’ve driven this car loads of times.”
“But you didn’t have that many driving lessons as I remember.”
I gave up trying to reason with him.
We drove into the harbor a good half hour before the Frisia ferry cast off from the Northern Pier. We had originally planned to park the car in the garage, walk to the ferry on foot, and then get a taxi to Marleen’s once we arrived in Nordeney. But that was before I’d been acquainted with my father’s suitcase. The prospect of hauling it onto the ferry along with everything else, only to struggle to put them all in a taxi at the other end, was so horrendous that I had already decided to take the car with us. Dorothea was in complete agreement. My father, who had read through the brochure for the Frisia ferry company, wasn’t. “But that’s silly. It says here that you can’t really drive that much over there, and it makes the ticket much more expensive. The island is so small, what do we even need a car for?”
By now, even Dorothea was too tired to get into a debate. I parked the car in line and went over to the ticket office.
“One car, three adults. Going today and coming back in two weeks.”
My father had followed me and stood right on my heels. I smiled at the ticket agent and tried to block my father’s view of the cash register. But it was no use; the answer came through a microphone. “That’ll be one hundred and fourteen euros please.”
“How much? And what would it be without the car?” My father had pushed in front of me.
“Fifteen euros each.”
“So just for the pleasure of sitting in the car, which we can’t even use much on the island anyway, we have to pay prices like that? That’s highway robbery.”
“You can leave the car in the garage, you know,” the agent said. “That’s what most of the passengers do.”
“That’s what I said, Christine. You see, it’s just that my daughter has so much luggage that she doesn’t want to carry it. I’m from Sylt, and the way we do it there is—”
“Heinz, come with me, will you?” Dorothea grabbed my father by the elbow and pulled him toward the door. “We can wait outside in the sun.”
I watched them go and then looked back at the ticket agent. By now there were about eight other passengers waiting behind me.
“One car, three adults, traveling today, coming back in two weeks.”
“Your father?”
The man looked at me sympathetically as he pushed the Nordeney tickets and the receipt underneath the window. I nodded.
“Well, I hope you manage to have a lovely time.”
I felt like I needed to explain something to him, but had no idea where to start. “Thanks, it’ll be fine I’m sure. I mean, it’ll be lovely, it’s just…”
He was already serving the next customer, so I went back over to the car and my father.
Most of the vehicles waiting by the loading bay were minibuses, vans, or cars with local license plates. Heinz only got back in the car after he’d walked up and down the line, looking at them all.
“None of the other cars are people on vacation. It’s no wonder you get robbed for taking a car with you. They must think we’re too precious to take a taxi or walk. They think we think we’re better than them. It’s embarrassing.”
“Dad, give it a rest. My nerves are shot enough already thanks to your damn suitcase—I’m not prepared to haul it across the island on top of
all that.”
My father looked at me, unperturbed. “Why are you so irritable? This vacation is coming at just the right time for you. You’re getting worked up over every little thing. Just wait, in two weeks you’ll be a new woman.”
I laid my forehead on the steering wheel and closed my eyes for a moment.
There was one major advantage of bringing the car: it saved us from having to line up with the other passengers on the gangway, which meant we got to the on-board restaurant first. So as those on foot rushed on, we were already seated at a table by the window. All of the walk-on passengers pulled suitcases or wore backpacks, and pushed and shoved each other impatiently.
Dorothea watched. “Good grief, they just keep coming. Why are all these masses of people going to Nordeney?”
“Well, we’re going there,” answered my father. “And did you notice? Most of them are about twenty years older than Christine, but they’re all carrying their own luggage.”
“Their suitcases have wheels, Dad,” I reminded him. “Unlike the one belonging to the man with the bad hip sitting at this table.”
With a hurt expression, Heinz reached for a menu. “I really don’t know why you have such a problem with my suitcase.” He skimmed over the contents. “Sausages, that’s good. I always eat sausages when I go on a ferry. Somehow it’s part of the experience.”
I took the menu from him. “I thought you were worried about them using old meat.”
He looked surprised. “Not in sausages. Surely not. Besides, I’m not that worried about it. My mother wasn’t that great a cook, you know.” He looked around him, intrigued. “It’s a fine ship. And so clean. Bigger than I imagined; like a proper ferry.”
“Dad, this is a proper ferry.”
“Well, the Romo–Sylt Line is bigger.”
“Nonsense.”
My father moved to get up, but Dorothea held him back. She’d been trying to fight back a fit of giggles for the last couple of minutes.
“Stay, sit down. Where are you going?”
