Schlesisches Tor




Rain falls from the eaves in torn sheets, bouncing off the shallow pools running along the tracks. Sometimes the traffic from below can be heard through the pouring, but otherwise the noises are drowned out & the station, already lifted in the air, seems to levitate further above the flooded streets. A young woman with thick blond hair pulls her sleeve over her gloveless hand, covers her mouth, mumbling to the man sitting beside her on the bench, telling him that the moment she renounces her desire she knows it will be impossible to return to it & the impulses that it feeds will never be recovered. She clings to the bench with both hands, rocking, watches the rain slide off the rails, sift through the gravel bed. He says no one knows what pieces of them can be forgotten or what pieces recovered & the soul has no dominion over what is wrestled from or plunged into the past. If he could forget what he has wanted to forget, then he could've left hours ago, nodding to each word she said, that they wouldn't have walked over the bridge, through the leaking rafters, soaked & shivering while the sky paled in the wake of its own disintegration, they wouldn't have been waiting in the station for the train she finally decides to step on when she resigns herself to the shreds of silence maneuvering between each plea for control, each throe of resistance against choices made long ago but of which she's been too frail to carry out. An old man with a beret hunches over, carrying two groceries sacks full of empty beer bottles that knock together like bells as he shuffles, their echoing swallowed by the storm gentle now as it approaches its end & night sets over the dispersing winds. The old man walks from beneath the station's roof out onto the uncovered platform. After he passes, she stands up & walks to the tracks, leaning over to see if the train's coming even though it reads six minutes on the screen above. A man in a black leather jacket circles near the wall, murmuring scheisse over & over into his phone. The old man steps through the arch, returning to dryness & wipes the drops from his face with his sopping hat, then puts his hands out before him, battling for balance as the bags slowly slip from his hands. She returns to the bench & says that how the last hours have transpired bears no relation to what either of them has chosen to forget or to remember. She tells him that she needs to return. But before she can return, she needs to find another distraction, another voice to lead her astray & then she can snap her fingers during a night very much like this one & awake on the Eastern border without a friend or lover as the fields become radiant with rain & she can finally be freed from her choices. She pauses & says that the station reminds her of a church in Ukraine. The lime-washed walls smooth as flesh. The windows curved at the top. The severe sparseness of it all. A church sliced in two down the middle, resting below the roof of the sky settling its wages with the passengers below without any semblance of divine reason & where no candles can be lit & set at the foot of the glassy-eyed body dangling above the steps. He tells her that before he used to go to her apartment, he would arrive fifteen minutes early & walk around the park behind her building, not paying attention to the families that gathered below the lime trees, the couples sitting around the fountain, totally bewildered, trying to remember how to utter simple sentences as if he had forgotten the rules governing speech, as if each word had accrued other significances that he had no chance of deciphering, sounds that he was unable to mimic, games that he was too stubborn to perform & when he went up the stairs to see her, he would always stutter slightly after first opening his mouth, powerless before the words flooding out. The old man steps out of the dryness up to the track & leans over to eye the horizon. This church where no idol stares. Cracked roof beneath a heaven shorn of felicity. He watches the old man then turns to ask her if this is the train, the one she's been so hesitant to board, anticipated from the moment they awoke in the morning, the ventilator in the courtyard reverberating up to their dank room at the top floor as pigeon feathers sifted through the onslaught of rain. Who awoke first to find that the view from the window had not transformed since the previous night & resembled the darkened fragments of the day before when neither of them made any sense & curled up in the refuge of a doorway on Sonnenallee? Whosever calls here with the world's expectations in hand kneels before an abandoned altar.  She stands up & remains motionless as the train comes to a hush & the others, including the old carrier of bells, step inside. She returns to the bench & says that even though she's done waiting, she still doesn't know how to leave.