Five years of living beside the railway station without once boarding a train.  Five years of hearing, day and night, the sighing, shunting sounds, the wailing and the whining, the rumble and thrum of locomotives on the way to somewhere, somewhere else.  Carried on the breeze, the acrid scent of diesel and of dirty oil, signalling space, signalling freedom, and the sudden, deeply sensual wafts of hot croissants and steaming coffee coming from the station bakery across from her window.  And above it all, above the railway lines, above the platform canopies, above the electric cables, the names of cities being intoned as from a muezzin’s tower: Hamburg, Zurich, Vienna … In this country, the trains had names.  They were called Heinrich der Löwe and Karl der Grosse, names redolent of a thousand years of European history, and they were long, as long as their names, as long as their history, and they went all the way to Hamburg, Zurich, Vienna, Hamburg, Zurich, Vienna …

“Am Gleis 3 bitte einsteigen.  Türen schliessen selbsttätig.  Vorsicht bei der Abfahrt,” intoned the crystalline syllables of the Tannoy, and for a second Jennifer caught herself translating the sentences into English, word by word, as she had used to on first coming here five years ago.  On platform 3, please get in.  Doors close independently.  Careful at the departure.”  It was indeed a strange language, a strangely alien, strangely distant tongue whose shapes and sounds would never be hers, however long she might live here.  What did they say in England?  What did they say in England, she wondered.  For a second a chill ran through her, a sick, cold shock of non-recognition.  It was a feeling she knew only too well from the classroom when finding herself confronted with a question she could not answer.  How do you make Christmas pudding?  What do the English think about Ireland? How many people are there in the House of Lords? And what do they say at English stations when the train is about to depart? That was it!” The train about to depart on platform 3 is the so-and-so for such-and-such … A warm flush of reassurance flooded her veins, and she breathed an audible sigh of relief.  Not that she would ever have to stand in front of a class again.

Jennifer went over to the window and leant out, savouring for a second the just-palatable coolness of the spring air on her cheek.  It was on a day like this, five years ago, that she had first come to Heidelberg, first entered this room, first leant out of this window.  She remembered as though it were yesterday the crushing feeling of disappointment she had experienced on that occasion.  She had been imagining some cosy little attic flat in the centre of the Old Town, a cranky, creaking place with dormer windows and pigeons and a wide view of the castle, perhaps, with a café downstairs and a Kneipe across the road and the sounds of laughter and music coming from the street below.  Instead she had found herself in an anodyne cube of grey concrete with a long set of regulations about cleaning the stairs and a view of the railway station.  On that first day, the day of her escape to the Continent, the day of her triumph and her defeat, she had sat at this window and cried for hours.

And then she had spent five years in the place.

She was looking around the room with its borrowed furniture and its ageing houseplants when the telephone rang.  It was the taxi firm ringing to query the booking she had made earlier that morning.

“Yes, eleven o’clock,” she said in rapid German.  “Yes, I rang at eight … No, I know.  I’ve got a lot of luggage, you see … OK, till eleven, then.  Yes.  That’s right.  Thank you.”

Two suitcases, a rucksack and a large shoulder-bag stood in a neat arrangement by the door.  A lot to carry.  Not a lot to show for five years spent in a place.  Again and again that phrase rang around her head, like something Biblical, like a curse, like a sentence: “Five years”.  Almost a fifth of her life.  Almost the last of her youth.  And she had spent it here, in this place, doggedly hanging on – to what? That was always the question, the question she could never evade.  Wandering around the half-empty rooms, with their sad smears of old Blu-Tac and their ghostly outlines of vanished picture-frames, she wondered what had possessed her to spend a fifth of her life here.  Was it courage? Cowardice? Was it adaptability? Apathy? She didn’t know herself; and when she looked at the place now, with the rickety dining-table which had been here when she came, and the musty sofa which had been here when she came, there seemed very little sign of her having lived here at all.  She had been, she supposed, like many a tenant of this building, like many a resident of this city, glad to have somewhere to live at all, anywhere that was reasonably central and reasonably cheap and reasonably reasonable … And so she had put up with the stinking carpet and the leaking shower, she had accepted the hand-me-down furniture and the hand-me-down pot plants, she had observed the stair-cleaning rota and put her bicycle in the right place and swept the snow from the pavement in front of the house when it was her turn.  At seven o’clock of a morning, as regulations stipulated, when it was her turn …

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