At the end of May I depart for Innsbruck, the first stop on a kind of lecture tour that will last one month. I order a taxi to drive to the train station on my way to Innsbruck. The driver is fairly old, in his late sixties possibly, and does not understand when I say ‘railway station, please’. So I say ‘bahnhof’, to which he replies in a stream of German. I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak any German’, which he doesn’t understand either, so I say ‘nicht sprechen de Deutsche’, which I know from my mother. Then he says, ‘nicht gut’, and again in English, ‘not good’. For some reason this comment upsets me deeply, and I am overcome by a surge of resentment. At first I attribute it to the anxiety of travel, and the jitters that precede a public talk. But then I realize it is an eruption of the accumulated alienation of hearing-without-comprehending the tongue of a cultural-archetypal oppressor. I am enraged. I think I shouldn’t have done this, come to a strange land without making an effort to learn the language of its people. I have tried hard to open my heart, to rise above the life-time conditioning of prejudice, but at this moment I cannot find forgiveness. Now the announcements of the conductor on the train, the solicitation of the waiters serving the first class wagon, even the soft spoken mobile phone conversation of the good looking man sitting across from me, or the hushed talk of the women in the seats beyond – all these jar me, my tolerance approximates nil.
I change trains at Munich, where I go to buy some drink and food for the rest of the journey, and again there is an unpleasant encounter. Ordering a snack in the fast food court, the man behind the counter mimics the lilting tone of my voice, which was polite and soft, and he does so twice. At first I think he might be flirting, but then it feels more like mocking. I don’t respond, and he disappears abruptly.
But when I get off the train, there is Gabriele to meet and welcome me, and from then on all is good.
