Berlin-Warszawa Express

by Eamon McGrath

  And she kept her promise. This was the first time I’d been back since Stagger, Jack, and I had stared up at the Berlin Wall, what seemed like years and years before. Since I was a stranger in Berlin again, not knowing anything about where to go and how to get there, she met me at the platform at Ostbahnhof and walked me back to her flat. It was there I first met her boyfriend, Aleksandr Rosenberg, and we all went out that night, getting typically Berlin-wasted.

  We went to a small bar and slammed beers and talked about art. A rauchen verboten sign hung above Aleksandr’s head that was only illuminated and made apparent to me when he lit a smoke. We argued and talked and laughed and howled like dogs amidst a pack of sheep, the hunger of an animal inside of us, thirsting to break the skin of the night. We talked about rock and roll and German techno, about the post-war world, and about painting and art and politics and the former DDR.

  On a television screen hanging in the corner, there were images of flooding in the southeast German province of Lower Bavaria, in the town of Passau. Shots of German soldiers and locals hauling sandbags and piling them up to counter the downpour of rain continued for what seemed like five minutes. I watched the television out of the corner of my eye, kept talking to Aleksandr and Exene and the group we sat with, and then didn’t think much more of it.

  Drunk as shit, we left the bar and went to a club along the banks of the Spree by Warschauer Strasse U-Bahn station and got in the long line of people pissing in the river. I was feeling pretty wobbly now, and laughing in every language.

  When we got into the club, the pounding rhythm of techno flew over my body like a cosmic wave. I ordered a Jäger and drank it fast, and as my blood started to pound, I threw up in the middle of the dance floor. In the next big wave I just kept dancing, as though nothing had even happened. I thought they’d be furious, but Exene and Aleksandr were keeled over, laughing hysterically, so much so that I thought it might be them who would hurl next.

  We held each other up by the arms and spirits when we left the club under the full Berlin moon like wolves changing back to our human forms.

  The next day was the only time, on that entire tour, that I wasn’t playing or travelling. I wandered around Berlin restlessly, like some kind of happy warrior who had made it through the final battle of a great war. I walked around Friedrichshain alone and crossed the Oberbaumbrücke into Kreuzberg, and by two o’clock in the afternoon I’d slammed a beer and the sun was reflecting off the Spree and through the envious green of my bottle. In silence I pondered the history of this place and stared back across the river at the East Side Gallery, that chunk of the Wall where I’d been with Stagger and Jack two years ago, and realized that it was the first time I’d ever been able to see it in the day, with all its makeup off, someone at their most honest and true, inarguably naked.

  I wrote my girlfriend and tried to explain my state, but my language was slurred by a weary blur of alcohol and exhaustion. I thought of Exene and Aleksandr and dancing into the wild chasms of the night. I thought of the red wine and Jägermeister and how I’d soaked all of it up like it had become part of me. All of it would then flow through me, through my layers of skin, through the rubber of my shoes, down beneath my feet and into the soil of the earth, and hopefully a part of it would someday seep into the river Spree.

  The next day, I had to leave once again, almost as quickly as I had come, and find my lonely way to Prague to finally meet up with Wilfred Manifesto for the tour’s final run of shows. From Berlin, I was to catch a train via Dresden and to the mysteries of Eastern Europe.

  I overheard a conversation about the massive flash flooding in southeast Germany that now had made its way into the Czech Republic. I thought of that footage I’d seen in the tavern days before, of the German military throwing sandbags at the coming water. The barriers were up to ten feet high, enormous, and thick enough to stop a bullet.

  On Czech trains, there are only private cabins, and you can pull the bottom of the seat out to form a bed that you can stretch out and lie on. If it’s just you in the cabin, you can pull out every chair and transform the inside of your train to a full floor of cushions that you can write, record, eat, or drink on. I lay down beneath the window, the sun still shining in on me, and slept off the previous Berlin nights.

  It was then that I first dreamt about my teeth. I was disoriented, falling, surrounded by a void of darkness. But this time, I couldn’t feel myself swinging into the wall like I’d remembered. Instead, in mid-air, I reached out somehow with my bottom molars and bit my top two teeth out myself. Blood followed me downwards through the air and stained the skin around my mouth, and my teeth started chattering, chattering, chattering in a dark unison with the percussive train tracks that pounded along beneath me, chattering and chattering.

  When I awoke, I couldn’t tell if I was still in the middle of it, that otherworldly and fantastic dream. The floods on the news were in reality far worse than I ever could have imagined. The cameramen collecting footage of soldiers amid the southeast German rain hadn’t pointed the camera over the border at the sheer damaging horror the weather had inflicted on the countryside of the Czech Republic. To say that I awoke to what could have been mistaken as the end of the world would be an understatement. This was the eradication of entire ways of life—entire villages and towns and highways lay underwater.

  The railroad between Berlin and Prague is elevated and runs above towns, which were barely visible on either side beneath the floodwater. On the left of me, towering highway road signs stood like tombstones of a lost civilization, and the tops of roofs of four- or five-storey apartment buildings looked equally as dead on the right. Rooftops were covered in salvaged goods that families would float up to in rowboats, continuing on like this for hours and hours, the train almost grinding to a halt countless times, the state of the railroad ahead uncertain. All that remained of cities was a faded dream.

  On those boats, people would peer into dark windows to try to get a glimpse of what remained of their lives. In some cases cars drifted by like dead bodies and people in lawn chairs drank away their tears along the side of the tracks. Children and families, trying to make sense of it, just stared at the passing train as speechless passengers gazed out the window. It was like the Czech countryside had been swallowed by a gigantic and frightening beast, this thought itself exhausting, made nearly insurmountable by the fact that it took me almost nine hours to get to Prague instead of the usual five. The train crawled along, water inching ominously close to the edge of the rails the entire way.

  I imagined some kind of spectre that haunted Europe, taking different forms throughout history: the Roman Empire, feudalism, the Black Plague, the Franco-Prussian War, World War II, fascism, and communism being this ghost at its most violent and oppressive. And now here it was again, poking its head through the soil and laughing at its own little practical joke. The spirit that had hounded the continent time and time again in the form of war and horror and disease also haunted on a much smaller scale, people caught within its hazy, foggy roar, and then it would just snap its fingers and return to its hibernation.

  The train didn’t speed up until it was closer to the city, which was also itself a watery mess. When I arrived in Prague, I discovered that the metro was closed because the underground stations were completely full of water. The Charles Bridge was closed too, because the Vltava was at record levels and inching closer to the bridge’s underside, teasing all those stone statues of saints, standing without an audience or purpose. Maybe the haunting ghost of Europe would swallow them too. I took a cab to the venue, far in Prague 6, and walked into the bar.

  And there was Wilfred, sitting, scribbling in a notebook at the table. Bulky and hunched over, deep in focus, all set up and loaded in and soundchecked, prepared, calculated.

  “Holy fuck,” I yelled, a sweaty, barbaric sight, looking like I’d seen a ghost. “You won’t believe the fucking day I had.”

 
I ordered a beer from the bar. Slowly I felt myself become something real once more. The blood returned to my face and I didn’t feel so pale. I tried to explain to Wilfred my last few weeks on the road: what began in London with Julia, and weaved its way through the Great German Plain to Berlin and then ended up here, at this table, ready to begin again.

  The show was fine and we were escorted out of the bar to the band room, outside and across the street in an adjacent flat.

  “There was a party here last night,” the sound girl said to me, and unlocked the door. The putrid smell of sweat was like a steam hanging in the air. She opened the window, and Wilfred put his bag at the foot of the bed. The floor was covered in a carpet of empty bottles and broken glass. There was a closet with what looked like a few thousand dollars worth of vodka and tequila, all with names I couldn’t read in Cyrillic, and a thin layer of black soil in the bed that was left in the opposite room. It had looked as though someone had taken a plant out of the flowerpot and shaken it by the leaves over the sheets. I put my bag at its foot, covered the dirt with a blanket from the bed beside it, and felt very far from home.

  She said goodnight and shut the door. After she left, Wilfred looked up at me.

  “Well,” he said, “we’re not staying in this shithole sober. Are you ready for a night out in Prague?” A few minutes later we hit the streetcar in Prague 6 and headed for Old Town.

  “They used to have undercover officers who would sit on the tram and catch you if you didn’t pay,” Wilfred explained. “Once I was on the train here, and a guy who we thought was just a skateboarder stood up at the front of the streetcar and started checking tickets. Just one of those perfect examples of that weird paranoia-as-police relics of communism.”

  I took my chances and walked on. Nobody caught me. Normally we would’ve taken the metro, but the whole underground was still closed and submerged. By now the sun was down and the Vltava River looked even more menacing. A few blocks from Old Town we got out, went into a drink shop, and bought some fuel. I cracked my beer at the counter with an opener at the till.

  Wilfred kept pointing at the architecture. “It looks like some kind of dream,” he said, over and over.

  And then curving around the corner after peering its eye at us for minutes undercover, maybe unbeknownst to me because I just wasn’t exactly looking for it, came Old Town Square.

  First, that spire. The big piece of black metal stretching upward, illuminated by the darkness of the night, seemed to have been encircled by an army of fallen angels with halos made of flies. And in that one moment, I believed in magic—the darkest, most brutal kind. Old Town Square at night when you’re piss drunk is like a hand that reaches around the outside of your soul and squeezes all the liquid out.

  A guy came up to us and tried to sell us weed and ecstasy and then offered to buy us each a shot of vodka for coming into the strip club that hires him to solicit out on the street. After two beers and a few rounds of shots we left, and walking back along the river we could see the spire rising again, becoming more and more violent. Wandering around, measuring the passing of time in hits of absinthe, dipping into a crowded bar full of obnoxious, drunken English kids on spring holiday, we caught a tram back to Prague 6 and I ventured into that room of uncorked liquor and poured a glass of tequila as Wilfred and I surrendered to the night.

  The next day I came to on the train. I don’t remember waking up in the morning—the tequila had robbed me of that. We were headed to Chemnitz, and for the second day in a row I bore witness to the destruction the floodwater had laid upon the citizens of the Czech Republic and the little that was left of their lives. I barely had the energy to go through another round of it, so I stretched out on the chair to sleep as Wilfred took photos from the window. “This is like hell on earth,” he said, and better understood my day previous.

  I awoke a half hour from Dresden and out of the flood. We were transferring to Chemnitz here, at the point of the day when the shadows are long and everything is a hazy yellow. At Dresden Hauptbahnhof we got out and killed an hour, walking along the main district of the town. I was now soaked in a deep sweat that clung to my clothes after leaping from my hair and skin, the kind of hangover that stays with you all throughout the day, inside your bones, up until you have your first drink. At that point, just waking up in the early evening, I was looking forward to the next time I could dive headfirst into the night and had replaced my pounding storm-drain headache with optimistic anticipation.

  Chemnitz is like a postcard from the DDR, circa 1989. Windows the length of buildings have been replaced with sheets of plywood. No one has a job and the grass is overgrown. Throngs of kids, angry and frustrated, turn to the far-right of the political spectrum, shave their heads, wave a German flag, and blame Jews and immigrants for the fact that their hometown went to shit and everybody lost their livelihood.

  The shadows stood long and flat in the Saxon sun and the streets were empty. We found the venue, located in a dingy basement tavern alongside the railway tracks, the door unlocked.

  In Chemnitz, it’s as tense as a clothesline. You can always feel a fight about to start. We overheard two people across a foosball table talking about an anarchist squat that had had violent confrontations with Nazis in the streets, sometimes involving showers of Molotov cocktails raining from top-storey windows, exploding and igniting as the polizei would rip around the corner and everything would scatter.

  Later on that night, when Wilfred finished his set, a group of skinheads gathered around the PA. We were ending the show, and the crowd had doubled in size, their shaved domes reflecting the lights on the ceiling. They were thirsty and ravenous. Wilfred and I both felt very far from home, east of the Berlin Wall, in the dilapidated ruins of the former DDR.

  As I was packing up my guitar and getting more nervous by the heartbeat, one of them walked over. He towered high above me, and seeing his giant hands I realized that I’d just be food for his fists.

  “You better not be done,” he said in broken English. His brow furrowed. “Tonight, all of us want to drink, and rock.”

  “Okay,” I said, voice shaking. I didn’t close the lid on my guitar case. “I’m not sure what else we can play, though.”

  He tightened his fist and leaned into us.

  “Do you know . . . ‘Hey Hey, My My’?” he asked.

  Wilfred and I laughed.

  “Of course we do,” we said and launched into a set of fierce Neil Young covers, played probably six or so, as a circle of dancers formed around us and our two guitars, amplified to all hell’s volumes in an underground German tavern bunker, the lights red with a nocturnal energy.

  We were fending off the violence of drunken, raging skinheads with the only weapons we had: acoustic guitars and songs by Neil Young. We weren’t sure how to stop, so we kept pulling them out, anything we knew. An uproar of orders and clinking glasses by the bar on the other side of the room was like a percussion section to our stripped down rock and roll.

  “‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’?” Wilfred whispered as the skinheads cheered.

  “‘Powderfinger’?”

  “‘Fuckin’ Up’?”

  “‘Campaigner’?”

  “‘Transformer Man’?”

  Song after song we went on like this, singing till our throats and fingers were red, dripping with sweat and totally exhausted. Some of the more obviously angry and raging skinheads left the bar, and a cloud of tension exited with them. We’d dodged a bullet, or fists, rather, and there was an inarguable sense that the violence that had entered the place had been lifted by the spell of music. When we unplugged our cables and the bar’s music came on, Wilfred and I looked at each other for a split second and let out a sigh of relief. We’d been playing for our lives.

  “Come to the bar,” someone shouted after we packed our guitars away. “We have to give you a Chemnitz tradition.”

 
I went to the bar with Wilfred and there was a tray of shots waiting. I asked him what he thought it was, and we looked at the five clear glasses, pondering if it was gin, vodka, some rare kind of schnapps, or worse.

  “Prost,” I said to everyone and downed the booze.

  My eyes shot right toward Wilfred, and I put my hands over my mouth, the putrid taste of whatever that liquor was racing down my spine, a feeling of blindness coming over my entire body. I ran to the bathroom, kicked open the door, and leapt into a stall, my whole head and body lurching over the toilet as I vomited.

  “What the fuck was that?” I asked as I came out into the circle of laughing idiots. “That was the worst fucking thing I’ve ever drank in my life.”

  The bartender turned her back and picked up a twenty-sixer of clear liquor and proudly displayed it to everybody. Cloves of garlic were sinking to the bottom, circling and stewing in the half-full bottle. I imagined that it only got stronger as more and more bands came through, as more and more travellers were subjected to this brutal Chemnitz ritual.

  “Thanks,” I said sarcastically. “I guess.”

  Just like any other night on the road, Wilfred Manifesto and I got piss drunk, maybe more so because of the fact that I’d just emptied the contents of my stomach into the bottom of a Chemnitz bathroom. We were taken to a small carpenter’s workshop to be given hash by a burly Turk, and then upstairs to the bartender’s house, where we passed out on an air mattress in the kitchen.

  When we woke at noon, we realized that every single surface in the kitchen was covered in dirty dishes, to the point where it was as though the owner of this place had decided to just go out and replace the dishes he’d eaten on instead of washing the ones he already had. There were flies everywhere, feasting on the encrusted pasta sauce and various gravies and stagnant dishwater that were still filling up the bowls, and you could have written your name in the brown film on the walls. The top of the fridge, the floor by the door, the entire counter, the mountain in the sink—there was not a single place in this room unoccupied by stacks and stacks of dishes.