We Go Forward

by Alison Evans

  Tiny objects, cluttering up everything. There are so many things stuffed into these cabinets, and there's just no space anywhere. How do they clean it all? Jesus.

  Nazi spoons. Fucking hell.

  "I don't know where I'm going to go next," Roslyn says as we move on to stare at a cabinet full of nails, hammers, and things that look exactly like they've been nicked from Dad's shed. Kept the house spotless, but the shed was full of shit. Old chairs that he said he would fix, and random bits of wood that 'will come in handy one day'.

  "You don't have a list?"

  I want to go everywhere. I need to leave Berlin soon; I can feel that tug that won't go away, no matter how fast I move. I'm not on the lease; I just give Carl money every week. I don't think he particularly enjoys this arrangement, but he hasn't said anything outright yet. It's only been two months; I can't believe the tug is already here.

  "I do; there's just no order to it yet." She pauses, looking at the nails in front of us. "Maybe Prague."

  "I've always wanted to go to Prague."

  A lot of the people I've met while travelling have been. Whenever someone has, they've always told me the same thing: you need to go to Prague. No one really gives an exact reason.

  "You could come with me," Roslyn says, looking at me now. "I mean, like, we haven't known each other very long, but you seem pretty neat and..." She scratches her elbow and breaks eye contact. "Maybe we'll end up hating each other in two seconds, but I wouldn't mind a travelling buddy."

  She says this all very quickly. As she finishes, she looks at me. It takes me a couple of seconds for what she's said to process in my brain. In those two seconds, she frowns and looks away.

  "Sorry. Too soon. It was stupid."

  "No, no," I say, putting a hand on her arm. It's nice having a friend. I mean, I have friends here, but it's more convenience than anything. There's a different kind of connection with Roslyn. "I'd love to come with you."

  She breaks into a smile. "Neat."

  "How long do you have left in your hostel?"

  "I've got three more nights booked."

  "Hmm." I don't give two shits about my job, so I can quit. Or just stop showing up. I've still got most of Dad's money, so that isn't an issue. Maybe I should feel bad about just spending his money like this and maybe it makes me a bad person, but at least in death he gave me something.

  I should give Carl some warning, though. He's definitely been one of the better people I've lived with, even if he does get angry that I keep forgetting to lock the door. But, in my defence, we still haven't been broken into, except for that one time when those people stole all our shoes.

  "I can stay for a little longer," Roslyn says. "My room's been empty half the time I've been here, and it's pretty cheap."

  "Awesome, thank you. I'll need maybe a week?"

  "That all?"

  "Yeah."

  Not much I'm leaving, anyway. It gets easier every time and the easiness should be worrying. But we're moving, and that's all that matters. My bones sigh in relief at the thought of only one more week in Berlin.

  We make plans at a café that has free WiFi. I tell Roslyn that if we want to get a real feel for the city we should stay more than a couple of days; we decide on Prague for two weeks, because that's the longest we can book the hostel. Plus, we don't want to be lugging around baggage every three or four days. It's cheaper to stay places longer, too: fewer trains and buses and flights, and you can figure out where the cheap places are to eat that won't kill you with bad sanitation.

  To get to Prague, we need to catch a train that's just under five hours. We're staying in a hostel that's twenty Australian dollars a night and is right near the castle. Everything sounds perfect, and as I wave goodbye to Roslyn, I feel like my head is made of light.

  *~*~*

  Carl's out when I get home. My room is bare; my dad used to call our house 'Spartan' instead of empty, and though I hated it when I was growing up, I've just replicated it. When I first moved out, but still lived in Melbourne, I bought so much shit to fill my room up with, keeping clutter on every surface to block out thoughts, because too much thinking happens when there's nothing to distract. But in the end, I just gave it all away and left the country. Leaving with nothing wasn't as cleansing as I thought.

  I could've sold it and left with more money, but the effort was too much. No one would want to buy my cluttery crap anyway; better to give it to op shops so they can sell it. My friends were upset that I didn't give them anything, but I don't know if we were really friends or just filling each others' empty spaces. I had real friends in high school, Emma and Jess, but then we drifted apart and moved interstate and got married and had busy jobs and were depressed; that's just how it goes, sometimes. It's not that I don't like people; I need them to survive, but the void in my chest means I can't be around anyone, sometimes.

  I've got a mattress on the floor that belongs to Carl, my netbook that I got years ago in Australia that barely works anymore, a tiny amount of clothing, a handbag, my backpack, and maybe ten books. Once I'm done reading books, I tend to leave them at train stations or somewhere where someone will pick them up. I rarely re-read things.

  I run a hand through my hair and grip my scalp, close my eyes, and breathe. Wait. Breathe. I open my eyes and close my door behind me.

  Roslyn's probably brought more for her three months than I own in the entire world. The thought makes me feel tiny, though it usually doesn't. I don't know why, because I don't care about things, exactly. Definitely evident in my lack of buying any things to decorate my room with. It's almost skeletal, but I don't know that I could manage otherwise.

  I turn on the heater and grab my doona. I'm halfway through some Penguin Classic by some dead guy that I don't care about, but the words are an easy distraction until I can replace them with a new book.

  I drift through the pages until I have to get up and turn on the light to see. It gets so dark here this time of year and it's fucking freezing every day. Because I haven't felt properly warm all day, I start running a bath.

  I've been trying to learn how to breathe underwater. Which isn't going to work, obviously, and I know it's ridiculous. But maybe if I hold my head under long enough, it'll work.

  I break through the water, gasping. My hair whips droplets through the whole room and I blink to get my eyes clear. They don't sting as much anymore when I get water in them. I press my fingertips to my neck, just under my chin, but the skin is smooth. My pulse beats away under the skin.

  *~*~*

  I spend the next few days busy with fixing up my room for Carl and saying goodbye to people. Lou, Geoff, Dipali, Amy, more people than I thought I would miss. And I find I am genuinely going to miss them. Lou showed me her favourite cafés; Geoff and Dipali where to buy books and groceries and find the best graffiti; and Amy worked at the same place as me before she quit, but we stayed friends.

  As I'm packing my backpack with all my books to give to Dipali, Roslyn sends me a text saying she wants to see more of the wall, so I reply with:

  I'm taking you to the East Side gallery, meet me at Warschauer Str station in an hour.

  She's seen bits of the wall, but the East Side Gallery is definitely something to see. I never tire of it and I can't even try to count how many times I've been down to see it in the time I've lived here. It's just over a kilometre of the Berlin wall, painted after it came down.

  It's snowing when we get there and the bright colours of the painted wall are stark against the white ground and the white sky. There's no break in the clouds above—they're seamless.

  My favourite bit is when you stand at the start and look down at how much there is. Art galleries are one thing, but art galleries that stretch for 1.3km out in the open covered in snow are another beast entirely. I know which I prefer.

  "Bloody hell," Roslyn says. She grins, her cheeks rounding as her breath comes out in a laughing fog. "This is shit-your-pants amazing."

  There aren't too many other pe
ople because of the cold, but we're not alone. It's very quiet and because it's the morning, there is still fresh snow under our shoes. The crunch of snow is a noise I will miss if I ever go back to Australia.

  Though the grey railing up the top is still attached and unpainted on the wall, the panels themselves are so boldly present and coloured that you barely notice.

  Roslyn takes photos as we walk along. Her face hasn't gotten any less joyous from that first laugh and her eyes are so bright. She grins at me, and I can't help but grin back.

  But, considering the wall's origins, not everything is going to be colour explosions.

  There is a painted thumbs-up. The first time I saw it, I didn't see anything amiss. But then, I noticed there's a ring of metal of the top of the thumb, and again on the wrist. There's a chain linking them, keeping the thumb in place.

  "How long after the fall did they do this?" Roslyn asks as we stare at the thumb.

  "Started in 1990, so the year after."

  "Quick."

  "Mm."

  We move on from the thumb.

  "I can see why they didn't tear it down," she says. "Reminders."

  "There are reminders everywhere."

  I know more about German history than my own country's. Australia's is bloody and racist and genocidal. They don't teach us why having Australia Day on the twenty-sixth of January is the most awful date that white Australia could have chosen. Parliament says we need to pay respects on Sorry Day to Indigenous Australians, but they don't follow through with policies to back up the empty gesture. Sweep everything under the rug; it'll be fine. No one will notice.

  "There are a lot of doves," Roslyn says. "Everything is so full of hope." She points to a line of graffiti and reads it out: "'No more wars. No more walls. A united world.' Imagine what it would've felt like, in the moments after the Mauerfall. It would've felt like that. I mean, this artist obviously felt like that. But, like, it's not at all."

  New growth, regrowth. Forests, trees, birds, swirling colours. There is joy here still, but the joy from the start has disappeared from Roslyn's body.

  'How's god? She's black,' a mural says. That brings some back to her.

  "Art is such… a human thing." She swallows, tries to find the right words. "Maybe, like, the most human thing. The wall came down, people made art. Make art out of the thing that suppressed you. I went to this exhibition yesterday and there was art made by prisoners in concentration camps. Even then, when there was nothing, these people had to make something." She stares hard at the blue-and-green Earth painted in front of us.

  "It's like a knee-jerk reaction."

  She laughs once. "Yeah. Exactly."

  All these different artists coming together to work on one thing that is about freedom.

  "It's so necessary," she says as we walk on.

  'When you read this we are far away,' a mural says.

  Chapter Five

  Roslyn

  The train to the Czech Republic has WiFi, so I'm emailing Jalen. I think about emailing Vee, just because she would have loved the East Side gallery. I have pictures that I could send her, but I don't know if I should reach out.

  "Have you ever broken up with a friend?" I ask Christie.

  She pulls out a headphone and thinks. "Not broken up, I think. Drifted apart, yes. You all right?"

  "This girl, we used to be friends and now we're not."

  "Your fault?"

  "A joint effort, I think." I smile at her, but it's that kind of smile that isn't. "She does graffiti and I was thinking of emailing her about the wall. But I dunno."

  "Do you want to be friends with her again?"

  "Sometimes."

  "If it's not a yes, then I wouldn't do it." Christie pauses as she eats a chip. "Not yet."

  She's probably right. I know our friendship wasn't exactly healthy, but still. There is still love there and whenever I think about her, I miss her. I close the empty email I'd addressed to her and open up Google.

  "Oh, hey," I point to the screen. "My Google's changed."

  Instead of being google.de, the address bar now shows google.cz. There was nothing to indicate that outside the windows we were switching countries. Our passports weren't even checked.

  "I'm sure I could've just lost my passport by now and no one would care," Christie says.

  @roslyn: just got to another country by TRAIN which is probs not that uncommon for a lot of ppl but still!!!

  @roslyn: #straya

  When we get to Prague, we see that there are only three train lines. It does make things a little less confusing, though I'm not quite sure how the ticketing system works. We don't have any cash on us, though, so we just hop on the tram that'll take us to our hostel.

  The road the hostel is on is up a huge hill. Huge. The castle sits on top, and we can barely see it over the buildings right in front of us.

  "Fucking beautiful," I mutter. "Who gave you the right, Prague."

  "You might change your mind after the hill," Christie says, pulling on her backpack a little tighter. She's got one of those proper backpacking ones. I really should have brought one of them instead of my suitcase on wheels that I'm dragging over the goddamn cobblestones. Cobblestones might look pretty, but they are impractical as all fuck and I keep slipping. I'm going to get blisters, I know.

  "It can't be that bad," I say.

  Oh. It can.

  We have to stop several times along the way. One of these stops is an ATM. The numbers on the screen are incredibly high.

  "Do I want how much money?" I stare. "The lowest is like a million dollars."

  "Crowns. Czech crowns, they're called." Christie pauses. "I don't remember the exchange rate. Just get, like, the third from the bottom."

  "Hmmm," I say as I press the button. "If this is a billion dollars, I will be a little mad."

  "But not that mad?"

  "Well, I'll have a billion dollars."

  It takes an eternity to get up the hill to our hostel. It's almost at the top, and then when we get there, the elevator is temporarily out of order and reception is on the fifth floor.

  "Just leave me," I say, sitting down on a step. "I'll live here and start my new life as a staircase dweller. It'll be fine; great, even. I can't wait."

  "Come on," she says. "We're almost done. We can drop our bags off, get some food, drink a lot, and stumble into bed."

  "That does sound fun," I say, so I drag myself up. Five floors. Whose idea was that?

  We're in a twelve-bed, all-female dorm. There are a couple of other girls there when we enter, but they're leaving for dinner and we don't really talk, apart from greetings. The only empty beds are top bunks and, again, there are the giant square pillows. We're both by the windows, but Christie's on the other side of the room.

  I flop down on mine once I've put the sheets on. "I want to sleep forever."

  Christie walks over to my bunk and taps my foot. "Come on, I'm starving."

  "Christie, we just caught a train to another country," I say into the pillow.

  "It's not going to amaze me if you keep saying it."

  "Another country. By train."

  "I know," she laughs, continuing to tap my foot. "I was there. Come on, let's eat."

  We wander down the hill and find a place that is inside and has WiFi. Our only two requirements, and the WiFi is my only requirement. Some places have tables where you can sit outside and they leave warm blankets on the chairs, but my fragile Australian body wouldn't be able to cope.

  We find that food here is mostly potatoes, bread, and ham. Luckily, these things are all delicious and I scoff everything. We wander around, and the whole while, the castle sits on top of the hill, brightly lit and looming over the city.

  @roslyn: possible actual fairy tale life right now

  @roslyn: we're staying on the same street as a CASTLE gdi

  We've walked too far back down the hill and now we have to trudge back up it. On the way, we find the gingerbread museum, which is a rip off a
nd is just a gingerbread shop; the KGB museum, which I am too afraid to enter; and some kind of musical museum, though I don't know what exactly.

  "Hoooolyyyyyy shiiiiit," I say. We've just found the alchemist museum. It's closed, but more importantly, there's an alchemist bar, Kellyxír, next door.

  It's freezing, so we go inside and it's warm as anything. It's a little tiring taking off so many clothes whenever you enter a building, but winter can't last forever. Or at least it better fucking not, because I'm already fantasising about going home to the 40°C heat and wearing dresses as I sit inside wishing I had air conditioning in my shoebox apartment.

  Kellyxír is a tiny place and there's seating room for maybe fifteen people at the most, but we're currently the only ones in here. All the furniture is chunky and wooden, and the walls are all painted white with alchemy-esque imagery scrawled on them. On the roof, there is a maze of glass tubes, beakers, pipes, and other weird alchemy bits and bobs that I don't know the names of. It's all lit up by different coloured lights, and we may have crossed into another dimension.

  I flick through the menu and it's all in Czech. The good thing about German is that sometimes words look the same, but it's more difficult with Czech. At least I know what vodka means. As I flick through the menu, I realise the second half is just the Czech parts repeated in English.

  "There's a drink called bear milk and I need it," I say, tugging on Christie's sleeve.

  "Two of them, then." Christie grins at me.

  The bartender comes over eventually. We speak no Czech and she speaks no English, but we get our drinks and they're warm.

  "I'm gonna need to learn some Czech," Christie says. "I usually learn some basic stuff before coming to a country."

  "Ja, ja."

  "I know that yes in Czech is ano. And apparently sometimes, it's shortened to no, so that's going to be fun."

  "Oh, jeez." I wrap my hands around the mug of bear milk. "My god, warm alcohol is something I can get used to." I can feel my cheeks warming up already. I spoon in some honey and this is the most delicious thing. Cinnamon, milk, rum, and honey.

  "Good choice," Christie says. She lets a little honey dribble out into her drink, but not nearly as much as I put in. She takes a sip and a fully-robed monk walks in, crosses the room behind her, and enters a back room door that's covered in a heavy red curtain.