Tanya blamed Scott for the nightmare. If anyone else came to visit, they’d want to see Big Ben, or the Eiffel Tower, or what was left of the Berlin Wall as it was being torn down. Scott had been talking about finding the snake charmer his coworker told him about.
“Yes, you’d mentioned it in your letters,” Tanya said.
Tanya’s roommate Bronwyn made a face. “Those snakes aren’t charmed. They can’t hear the music. They think they’re in danger. And those charmers rip out their fangs and sew their mouths shut. It’s horrible.”
“It’s a fucking snake,” Scott said. “Who cares?”
That night Tanya dreamed she got a gift, and when she opened it snakes poured out. Their mouths were bloody. She bolted upright, gasping, and Scott snapped, “What is it now?”
Scott had flown from Boston to see Tanya at the end of her school year in England, where she had been studying at Manchester University. They had officially been on a break but she found she wasn’t interested in dating anyone in England. There were guys she liked and guys she would have been with in any other circumstance, just not this one where she was here for a year and then back home. It would be messy, and things had been messy enough when she’d let Scott and everyone else know that she’d been accepted to the program.
“I didn’t think you’d actually get accepted,” he said when she told him.
A few weeks after the news settled in that she’d be leaving the country, Scott said, “Well, maybe we should see other people.”
She thought of him with someone else. She imagined him dating the anti-Tanya. A girl in ripped fishnets with dyed black hair and a lot of eyeliner who carried a tattered copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair at Scott’s recommendation. A girl who would go to shows at The Channel or The Rat, maybe someone old enough to go to the regular shows, or someone who had a fake ID, unlike Tanya, who was twenty when she left for England and not interested in getting busted for something stupid.
“Sure,” she said. “If that’s what you want.”
The day before her flight, he’d finally asked her not to go.
She looked at him, sifting through reasons that he might have accepted, then shrugged internally. It wouldn’t matter, no reason would be enough for him.
“I’m going,” she’d said.
In the eight months since she’d left, they sent letters.
Tanya talked about her classes and her friends there, about riding in the top of a double decker bus, about pub crawls and black pudding, about weekend trips to Castleton and the Lake District and Norwich and Cornwall.
Scott talked about the bands he saw, the classes he was taking part time and his job at Quincy Market. He wrote about his new coworker, and how she’d spent a semester in Germany and saw the snake charmer in Berlin. German guy, Scott wrote. She said he was a white German dude, went to India to learn.
Neither had mentioned seeing anyone else.
Scott’s letters were friendly, relaxed, like he was when they were freshmen in college and first started dating. They’d first met at a party, talking about books they’d read. He seemed so different from the guys Tanya had met up until then. He listened to bands most people hadn’t heard of. He didn’t douse himself in Polo cologne. He wore his long hair back, seemed quiet, not brash and loud and dumb like everyone else at every other party she’d been to. They saw local bands at all ages shows. They got takeout and talked into the early morning, Scott sometimes smoking a joint.
By the time she’d applied to go to Manchester, Scott had become more of a habit than a boyfriend. He dropped out, got a job at a store in Quincy Market, smoked weed and went to shows. As the plane left the ground and Boston was a speck under her window, she felt relieved and then felt sour with guilt.
When Scott wrote and suggested traveling around Europe together, Tanya remembered those first months together. She pictured them in trains leaning back, looking at the passing scenery, laughing. They’d talk late into the night again about what they saw, and what they’d been doing while they were apart. The past eight months had washed away all the doubts that had been growing. The freedom she felt emboldened her to believe that things would be fine.
The first days were easy. They started the mornings with coffee (and a pastry for Tanya) and made their way through whichever city they’d traveled to. In Amsterdam the owner of the pension asked Tanya where she was from and didn’t believe her when she said the United States. Scott laughed at that. He wanted to go to the hash bars, she wanted to go to the Anne Frank House. Scott got high that night and laughed at everything Tanya said, declaring her “really funny, actually.”
In Brussels they found the Manneken Pis, a fountain of a little boy urinating. She made sure to take photos of it and grabbed every postcard she could that featured it.
By Hannover in Germany Scott was waking later while Tanya kept waking up early. It was noon by the time they’d gotten out of the room. The sun bounced off of car windshields and into Tanya’s eyes. Everyone talked too loudly. No one seemed capable of moving without jostling her. Scott’s cigarette–hand rolled–reeked and made her stomach turn. The stench of cigarette smoke lingered on her leather jacket, something that she could never get used to.
Her mood improved after she ate something. At the Herrenhauser Gardens, they walked along ruler straight lanes, gazing at lines of shrubbery and flowers amid planes of grass. The gardens stretched on into the distance and Tanya found herself thinking of boxes and snakes.
“I wonder if there are any snakes here,” she said.
“That’s a weird thought,” Scott said.
She shrugged. “I mean, it’s a garden. There have got to be animals here.”
“I guess,” he said. “Let’s get out of here, this is boring.”
Everything was boring to Scott in Hanover. The zoo, the parks, the buildings. Didn’t matter.
“I had no idea you were so boring,” he said. “It’s like you traveled overseas and just got boring.”
Tanya didn’t say anything to that. There was nothing she could say to make it better and she was tired of trying to make things better anyway.
Saying nothing didn’t help. On the street heading back to the pension, Scott got angry about something–maybe her silence, maybe her dullness, maybe the glare of the sun in his eyes, and started kicking a trash can.
“Jesus Christ,” she finally said, “do you want to get arrested?”
“You’re just having a grand old time here, aren’t you? Making friends will all kinds of guys, and doing whatever the fuck you want–”
“I’m not doing this,” she said and walked away. “I am not dealing with this again. Cut it out or we go our separate ways.”
He’d stopped, sulked, and stalked forward ahead of her.
That night, after a tense meal, they were back in the room. Scott had his Walkman on. Tanya was sitting at the small desk in the corner, a map spread out. She traced the roads and railroad tracks with her finger. From Hannover it wasn’t a long trip to Denmark. From Denmark she could take a ferry and a train and get to Sweden. Or she could go south to Salzberg, then to Milan, and continue down to the heel of Italy and take a ferry to Greece. Or go southwest to Spain and Portugal. She saw the small thread of blue between Spain and Africa and thought about going to Morocco. Africa was just so close. She’d thought it was an impossible distance but really, a few train rides and maybe a ferry?
“What do you think about going to Morocco?” she asked Scott.
Scott stared out the window, music leaking from his headphones.
They had to fill out embarkation cards on the train to Berlin. Tanya laughed at some of the questions–did they bring weapons, and among the examples was “harpoon.”
“Yes,” she said to Scott, “I was going to go whaling in Berlin.”
They kept quiet after that. The train rolled down the track, a little slower than before, passing small homes in the middle of small squares of land in a grid, the rectangles of gray buildings, roads with a few cars on them. Tanya found herself taking in the few people she saw outside, trying to memorize them, willing them to look up. Don’t you know this is a big deal? she thought. We’re coming from outside into your box, going into another little box.
The people outside took no notice of the train. She imagined their lives, of work, of fun, of school. She’d heard so much about life behind the iron curtain and it was almost disappointing to see it appeared normal, if a little quiet.
“The Stasi hates punks, you know,” Scott said.
Tanya raised her eyebrows. Scott, with his brown ponytail, did not look like the people at the punk shows he went to.
“What?”
His voice was loud in the car. “The Stasi. The secret police in East Germany. They hate–”
“Okay. I know the wall is coming down and all but the Cold War isn’t officially over yet. Keep your voice down.”
“What do you think–”
Tanya took a breath. She imagined them, big Americans with big voices and big opinions in a small train car in a country made into smaller halves, going to a city pulled into two smaller halves.
“People live here.” She kept her voice low.
“No shit.” Scott rolled his eyes and put his headphones on.
West Berlin was a cacophony of neon lights, department stores and boutiques, nightclubs and restaurants, crowds of people and the rumble and roar of traffic.
“Holy shit,” Tanya said. “I need to sit for a minute.”
“Don’t sit too long,” Scott said. “I want to find that snake charmer.”
They went to the Wall. They saw a yellow station wagon behind a building they passed, tires gone, windows smashed, STASI spray painted on the side. At the Wall there were people selling wares in a hodgepodge of folding tables. They sold army memorabilia, band stickers, tapes, pins. Pieces of the wall, which made her laugh. Graffiti covered the wall with messages like BRIT, I LOVE YOU and IF WE WERE HERE A YEAR AGO, WE WOULD HAVE BEEN SHOT spray painted on it.
“Are you going to take a piece?” Scott asked her.
She thought of boxes and trapped snakes. “No,” she said. “I don’t want any part of that filthy thing.”
“Yeah, but it’s a victory over communism.”
“Well, you keep one then. I don’t want it.”
They went through the checkpoint into East Berlin. The noise level was much lower, the buildings grayer, and a handful of Trabants made their way down the streets.
“I guess you won’t need to sit down for a minute here,” Scott said.
Coming back to the Western side, Scott asked someone at one of the tables about the snake charmer. The man shook his head. “I don’t know about a snake charmer,” he said.
Scott asked some more people and got the same answer. His mouth twisted. Tanya looked at his hands and saw them clenched into fists. Shit, she thought.
“This is bullshit,” he said.
He was sullen all throughout dinner. On the way back to the pension he said, “Let’s go home early. Fuck it. It’s like another week, it’s easy enough to change the ticket. There’s nothing here.”
“No.”
“There’s nothing here, Tanya.”
“Scott, if you want to go home, then go home. Change your plane ticket, I don’t care. But I’m not going home yet.”
Scott wheeled around. “You don’t get to decide. You’re not in charge here, you know.”
“I’m not telling you what you can do. I’m telling you what I’m going to do,” Tayna said, and turned to leave. She felt a tug, then a yank at her arm, and she stumbled backwards.
“What the hell?”
“You can’t just go,” Scott said. “You can’t just leave me like that.”
She looked at him then. Hooded eyes, narrow face, lanky and stooped, fingers stained yellow from the cigarettes he hand rolled. She thought about telling him right then and there that she was done. Then she pictured him doing what he did when he was angry: kicking the trash can in Hannover, punching a wall, throwing something.
“I am going back to the pension. You can go home. It’s your choice. I am not stopping you.”
“You are such a little bitch sometimes, you know that?”
“I’m not doing this anymore,” she said.
He tightened his grip on her arm. She yelped.
People were stopping, staring.
“Let me go. You’re hurting me.”
He finally let go. She spun around, pushed her way through the crowd, letting it swallow her as the noise of him arguing with people in his way as he tried to follow her grew more distant.
She got back to the room, shoved the few things she had into her backpack, and left. On the train to Stuttgart, she opened her map. It was a night train, one less night to pay for a pension, one more night free to stay somewhere else. She could go wherever she wanted. From Stuttgart to France to Spain to Morocco. Or to Italy to Greece, Turkey–hell, maybe Syria? Everything was so close, when you thought about it.
She would go anywhere, and everywhere.
Pamela McCarthy‘s work has appeared in The Bluebird Word, On the Run, Lighthouse Weekly, and Drunk Monkeys. When she isn’t writing, you will find her reading, buying seeds for her garden, or creating more garden space because she bought so many seeds.