Neither Here Nor There

by Bill Bryson

  The Y Not had a waitress named Shirley who was the most disagreeable person I have ever met. Whatever you ordered, she would look at you as if you had asked to borrow her car to take her daughter to Tijuana for a filthy weekend.

  ‘You want what?’ she would say.

  ‘A pork tenderloin and onion rings,’ you would repeat apologetically. ‘Please, Shirley. If it’s not too much trouble. When you get a minute.’

  Shirley would stare at you for up to five minutes, as if memorizing your features for the police report, then scrawl your order on a pad and shout out to the cook in that curious dopey lingo they always used in diners, ‘Two loose stools and a dead dog’s schlong,’ or whatever.

  In a Hollywood movie Shirley would have been played by Marjorie Main. She would have been gruff and bossy, but you would have seen in an instant that inside her ample bosom there beat a heart of pure gold. If you unexpectedly gave her a birthday present she would blush and say, ‘Aw, ya shouldana oughtana done it, ya big palooka.’ If you gave Shirley a birthday present she would just say, ‘What the fuck’s this?’ Shirley, alas, didn’t have a heart of gold. I don’t think she had a heart at all, or indeed any redeeming features. She couldn’t even put her lipstick on straight.

  Yet the Y Not had its virtues. For one thing, it was open all night, which meant that it was always there if you found yourself having a grease crisis or just wanted to be among other people in the small hours. It was a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper’s painting ‘The Nighthawks’.

  The Y Not is long gone, alas. The owner, it was said, ate some of his own food and died. But even now I can see it: the steam on the windows, the huddled clusters of night workers, Shirley lifting a passed-out customer’s head up by his hair to give the counter a wipe with a damp cloth, a lone man in a cowboy hat lost in daydreams with a cup of coffee and an untipped Camel. And I still think of it from time to time, especially in places like southern Belgium, when it’s dark and chilly and an empty railway line stretches out to the horizon in two directions.

  7. Aachen and Cologne

  I took a train to Aachen. I hadn’t been there before, but it was only a short journey from Liège, where I had spent the night, and I had always wanted to see Aachen Cathedral. This is an odd and pleasantly neglected corner of Europe. Aachen, Maastricht and Liège are practically neighbours – only about twenty miles separate them – but they are in three countries, speaking three distinct languages (namely Dutch, French and German), yet the people of the region employ a private dialect that means they can understand each other better than they can understand their fellow countrymen.

  I got a room in a small hotel across from the station, dumped my rucksack and went straight out. I had a lunch of burger and fries in a hamburger chain called Quick (short for ‘Quick – a bucket’), then set off to see the town.

  My eagerness surprised me a little, but I hadn’t been to Germany in seventeen years and I wanted to see if it had changed. It had. It had grown even richer. It was rich enough in 1973, but now – golly. Even prosperous Flanders paled beside this. Here, almost every store looked rich and busy and was full of stylish and expensive goods like Mont Blanc pens and Audemars Piguet watches. Even the stores selling mundane items were riveting – J. von der Driesel, for instance, a stockist of kitchenware and other household goods at the top of a hill near the old market square. Its large windows displayed nothing more exciting than ironing boards, laundry baskets and pots and pans, but every pan gleamed, every piece of plastic shone. A little further on I passed not one but two shops selling coffins, which seemed a bit chillingly Germanic to me, but even they looked sleek and inviting and I found myself staring in admiration at the quality of the linings and the shine on the handles.

  I couldn’t get used to it. I still had the American habit of thinking of Europe as one place and Europeans as essentially one people. For all that you read that Denmark’s per capita gross domestic product is forty per cent higher than Britain’s, the Danes don’t look forty per cent richer than the British, they don’t wear forty per cent shinier shoes or drive forty per cent bigger cars. But here people did look rich and different, and by a factor of much more than forty per cent. Everyone was dressed in clothes that looked as if they had been purchased that morning. Even the children’s trainers weren’t scuffed. Every car had a showroom shine on it. Even the taxis were all Mercedes. It was like Beverly Hills. And this was just an obscure little city on the edge of the country. The Germans were leaving the rest of us standing.

  Not everything was perfect. Much of the architecture in the city centre was blatantly undistinguished, especially the modern shopping precinct, and the bars and restaurants didn’t have the snug and convivial air of those in Holland and Belgium. But then I found my way to the calm of the cathedral close and warmed to Aachen anew. I went first to the Schatzkammer, the treasury, which contained the finest assortment of reliquaries I ever expect to see, including the famous life-size golden bust of Charlemagne, looking like a god; a carved sixteenth-century triptych depicting Pope Gregory’s mass, which I think I could look at almost for ever; and assorted other baubles of extraordinary beauty and craftsmanship.

  The whole collection is displayed in three small, plain, feebly lit rooms, but what a collection. Next door was the octagonal cathedral, modelled on the church of San Vitale at Ravenna, and all that remains of a palace complex mostly destroyed during the Second World War. The cathedral was small and dark but exquisite, with its domed roof, its striped bands of contrasting marble and its stained glass, so rich that it seemed almost liquid. It must have been cramped even in Charlemagne’s day – it couldn’t seat more than a hundred or so – but every inch of it was superb. It was one of those buildings that you don’t so much look at as bathe in. I would go to Aachen tomorrow to see it again.

  Afterwards I passed the closing hours of the afternoon with a gentle stroll around the town, still favouring my sore ankle. I looked at the large cobbled Marktplatz and tottered out to the preternaturally quiet residential streets around the Lousberg park. It was curious to think that this pleasant backwater was once one of the great cities of Europe, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne’s capital. I didn’t realize until I turned again to Gilbert’s history of the Second World War a day or so later that Aachen was the first German city to fall to the Allies, after a seven-day street battle in 1944 that left almost the whole of it in ruins. You would never guess it now.

  In the evening I went looking for a restaurant. This is often a problem in Germany. For one thing, there’s a good chance that there will be three guys in lederhosen playing polka music, so you have to look carefully through the windows and question the proprietor closely to make sure that Willi and the Bavarian Boys won’t suddenly bound onto a little stage at half-past eight, because there is nothing worse than being just about to tuck into your dinner, a good book propped in front of you, and finding yourself surrounded by ruddy-faced Germans waving beer steins and singing the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ for all they’re worth. It should have been written into the armistice treaty at the end of the war that the Germans would be required to lay down their accordions along with their arms.

  I went up to six or eight places and studied the menus by the door but they were all full of foods with ominous Germanic names – Schweinensnout mit Spittle und Grit, Ramsintestines und Oder Grosser Stuff, that sort of thing. I expect that if ordered they would turn out to be reasonably digestible, and possibly even delicious, but I can never get over this nagging fear that I will order at random and the waiter will turn up with a steaming plate of tripe and eyeballs. Once in Bavaria Katz and I recklessly ordered Kalbsbrann from an indecipherable menu and a minute later the proprietor appeared at our table, looking hesitant and embarrassed, wringing his hands on a slaughterhouse apron.

  ‘Excuse me so much, gentlemens,’ he said, ‘but are you knowing what Kalbsbrann is?’

  We looked at ea
ch other and allowed that we did not.

  ‘It is, how you say, what ze little cow thinks wiz,’ he said.

  Katz swooned. I thanked the man profusely for his thoughtfulness in drawing this to our attention, though I dare say it was a self-interested desire not to have two young Americans projectile-vomiting across his dining-room that brought him to our table, and asked him to provide us something that would pass for food in middle America. We then spent the intervening period remarking on what a close shave that had been, shaking our heads in wonder like two people who have stepped unscathed from a car wreck, and discussing what curious people the Europeans are. It takes a special kind of vigilance to make your way across a continent on which people voluntarily ingest tongues, kidneys, horsemeat, frogs’ legs, intestines, sausages made of congealed blood, and the brains of little cows.

  Eventually, after walking some distance, I found an Italian restaurant called Capriccio just around the corner from my hotel on Theaterstrasse. The food was Italian, but the staff were all German. (I could tell from the jackboots – only joking!) My waitress spoke no English at all and I had the most extraordinary difficulty getting myself understood. I asked for a beer and she looked at me askance.

  ‘Wass? Tier?’

  ‘Nein, beer,’ I said, and her puzzlement grew.

  ‘Fear? Steer? Queer? King Leer?’

  ‘Nein, nein, beer.’ I pointed at the menu.

  ‘Ah, beer’, she said, with a private tut, as if I had been intentionally misleading her. I felt abashed for not speaking German, but comforted myself with the thought that if I did understand the language I would know what the pompous man at the next table was boasting about to his wife (or possibly mistress) and then I would be as bored as she clearly was. She was smoking heavily from a packet of Lord’s and looking with undisguised interest at all the men in the room, except of course me. (I am invisible to everyone but dogs and Jehovah’s Witnesses.) Her companion didn’t notice this. He was too busy telling her how he had just sold a truckload of hula hoops and Leo Sayer albums to the East Germans, and basking in his cunning.

  When he laughed, he looked uncannily like Arvis Dreck, my junior high school woodwork teacher, which was an unsettling coincidence since Mr Dreck was the very man who had taught me what little German I knew.

  I had only signed up for German because it was taught by a walking wet dream named Miss Webster, who had the most magnificent breasts ever and buttocks that adhered to her skirt like melons in shrink wrap. Whenever Miss Webster stretched to write on the blackboard, eighteen adolescent boys would breathe hard and let their hands slip below the table. But two weeks after the school year started Miss Webster departed in mysterious circumstances – mysterious to us anyway – and Mr Dreck was drafted in to take over until a replacement could be appointed.

  This was a catastrophe. Mr Dreck knew slightly less than bugger-all about German. The closest he had come to Germany was a beerfest in Milwaukee. I’m sure he wasn’t even remotely qualified to teach the language. He taught it to us from an open book, running a stubby finger over the lines and skipping anything that got too tricky. I don’t suppose he needed a lot in the way of advanced degrees to teach junior high school woodwork, but it was clear that even there he was operating on the outer limits of his mental capabilities. I learned more German from watching Hogan’s Heroes.

  I hated Mr Dreck as much as I have ever hated anyone. For two long years he made my life hell. I used to sit during his endless monotone lectures on hand tools, their use and care, genuinely trying to pay attention, but after a few minutes I would find my gaze romping around – thirty-six adolescent girls, all wearing little blue pleated skirts that didn’t quite cover their pert little asses – and my imagination would break free, like a dog off its lead, and scamper playfully among them, sniffing and panting around all those long, tanned legs. After a minute or two I would turn back to the class with a dreamy leer tugging at my lips to find that everyone was watching me. Mr Dreck had evidently just launched a question in my direction.

  ‘Pardon, Mr Dreck?’

  ‘I said what kind of blade is this, Mr Bryson?’

  ‘That’s a sharp blade, Mr Dreck.’

  Mr Dreck would emit one of those exasperated sighs that stupid people reserve for those happy occasions when they chance upon someone even more stupid than they, and say in a wearied voice, ‘It’s a fourteen-inch Hungarian dual nasal borer, Mr Bryson.’ Then he would make me stand for the rest of the hour at the back of the room holding a piece of coarse sandpaper to the wall with my nose.

  I had no gift for woodwork. Everyone else in the class was building things like cedar chests and ocean-going boats and getting to play with dangerous and noisy power tools, but I had to sit at the Basics Table with Tubby Tucker and a kid who was so stupid that I don’t think we ever learned his name. We just called him Drooler. The three of us weren’t allowed anything more dangerous than sandpaper and Elmer’s Glue, so we would sit week after week making little nothings out of offcuts, except for Drooler who would just eat the glue. Mr Dreck never missed a chance to humiliate me. ‘And what is this?’ he would say, seizing some mangled block of wood on which I had been labouring for the last twenty-seven weeks and holding it aloft for the class to titter at. ‘I’ve been teaching shop for sixteen years, Mr Bryson, and I have to say that this is the worst bevelled edge I’ve ever seen.’ He held up a birdhouse of mine once and it just collapsed in his hands. The class roared. Tubby Tucker laughed so hard that he almost choked. He laughed for twenty minutes, even when I whispered to him across the table that if he didn’t stop it I would bevel his testicles.

  The waitress brought my beer and I became uncomfortably aware that I had spent the last ten minutes adrift in a little universe of my own, very possibly chuckling quietly and murmuring to myself in the manner of people who live in bus stations. I looked around and was relieved to see that no one appeared to have noticed. The man at the next table was too busy boasting to his wife/mistress how he had sold 2,000 Jason King video tapes, 170 Sinclair electric cars and the last 68,000 copies of the American edition of The Lost Continent to the Romanians for loft insulation. His companion meanwhile was making love with her eyes to a man dining alone across the room – or rather masturbating with her eyes, since the man was too busy struggling with three-foot-long strands of tangled spaghetti to notice that he was being used as a sex aid.

  I took a big draught of my beer, warmed by my reminiscences, and quietly jubilant at the thought that my schooldays were for ever behind me, that never again for as long as I lived would I have to bevel an edge or elucidate the principles of the Volstead Act in not less than 250 words or give even a mouse-sized shit about which far-flung countries produce jute and what they do with it. It is a thought that never fails to cheer me.

  On the other hand, never again would I experience the uniquely satisfying sensation of driving a fist into the pillow-like softness of Tubby Tucker’s abdomen. I don’t wish to suggest that I was a bully, but Tubby was different. God put Tubby on earth for no other reason than to give other kids someone to beat up. Girls beat him up. Kids four years younger than him beat him up. It sounds cruel – it was cruel – but the thing is he deserved it. He never learned to keep his mouth shut. He would say to the toughest kid in the school, ‘God, Buckley, where’d you get that hair-cut? I didn’t know the Salvation Army offered a hair-styling service,’ or ‘Hey, Simpson, was that your mom I saw cleaning the toilets at the bus station? You ought to tell her those cigarette butts would smoke better if she dried them out first.’

  So every time you saw him he was being given a Chinese burn or having his wobbly pink butt mercilessly zinged with damp towels in the locker-room or standing in his underpants beneath a school-yard oak endeavouring with a long stick to get his trousers down from one of the branches, where they had recently been deposited by a crowd of up to four hundred people, which sometimes included passing motorists and the residents of nearby houses. There was just something ab
out him that brought out the worst in everyone. You used to see pre-school kids chasing him down the street. I bet even now strangers come up to him on the street and for no reason smash his hot dog in his face. I would.

  In the morning I went to the station to catch a train to Cologne. I had half an hour to kill, so I wandered into the station café. It was a little one-woman operation. The woman running it saw me take a seat, but ignored me and instead busied herself tidying the shelves behind the counter. She was only a foot or so from me. I could have leaned over and used her buttocks as bongos, but it gradually dawned on me that if I wanted service I would have to present myself at the counter and make a formal request. It would never occur to her to conclude that I was a foreign visitor who didn’t know the drill and say to me in a pleasant voice, ‘Coffee, mein Liebschen?’ or even just signal to me that I should step to the counter. No, I was breaking a rule and for this I had to be ignored. This is the worst characteristic of the Germans. Well, actually a predilection for starting land wars in Europe is their worst characteristic, but this is up there with it.

  I know an English journalist living in Bonn who was phoned at work by his landlady and instructed to come home and take his washing down from the line and rehang it in a more systematic manner. He told her, in so many words, to go fuck herself, but every time he put washing out after that he would return home to find it had all been taken down and rehung. The same man came in one weekend from cutting the grass to find an anonymous note on the doormat informing him that it was illegal to mow one’s lawn in North Rhine-Westphalia between noon on Saturday and 9 a.m. on Monday, and that any further infractions would be reported to the lawnmower police or whatever. Eventually he was transferred to Bogotá and he said it was the happiest day of his life.