Speak or Die: IV

on heatwaves, ruins, and techno

In the morning we take a train to Geneva. We only have a day here, or rather two half days, because Switzerland is so incredibly expensive. We eat the most incredible fondue on the pier and swim in lake Geneva. Because it’s a Monday, everything is closed. Workers rights, my aunt had explained to us in Toulouse. We watch the sun set over the city. A man we met at the pier told us there’s a music festival, so naturally we spend the evening checking it out. We start at a techno booth where at least two hundred people are crowded on a balcony, dancing under the lights and smoke. On stage, a performer wearing a mask of at least seven faces, boots so long the toe boxes curl around themselves in large spirals, and a white slip dress moves in strange, jerky motions while sighing and screaming. The crowd loves it. Smoke falls thick over the city; it’s almost midnight and the crowd dances like nobody has work in the morning. No one our age, notably––mostly middle-aged professionals who for some reason seem really into performance art. We end up later at a lesbian jazz-rock improv band whose set is powered entirely by bicycles ridden by crowd volunteers in front of a large church and then at a math-rock band tucked away in a courtyard.

In the morning, we sit in a coffee shop for two hours talking about life philosophies, family, love. No one else is in the cafe. We try various pastries, chocolates, and croissants. Later we climb the towers of an old church. Two or three hundred stairs into the sky, we step out onto a panoramic balcony for a stunning view of the city. We climb back down through the belltower to the tune of bells twinkling on the hour. A choir is gathered on the steps outside and we watch them for a moment.

For lunch we stop into a restaurant burrowed into a rock cave. We sit and ask for a menu. The waiter hands us a booklet of drinks and asks how many chickens? What, we ask. Again she says how many chickens? I ask if there’s anything I can eat. This is a chicken restaurant, she says. We serve chicken. She offers me a chicken salad with no chicken. The others feast on entire roasted chickens and fries which, according to them, is superb. On the walk to the train station we pass a continuation of the music festival in the park; a woman sings a cover of MJ’s Billie Jean.

On our first day in Zurich we stop by a cafe elaborately decorated with flowers and vines. Cafe Felix, it’s called. More like Cafe Expensive. We pay out the nose for coffee. My Swiss hot chocolate with espresso comes warm and gooey and rich. I’m annoyed that it’s almost worth spending the 10 Swiss franc on. Then Chey and I split off from the boys to shop around. We visit two churches, Fraumunster and Grossmunster. We read about the establishment of the Fraumunster. According to local legend, two devout princesses from a neighboring town in Germany would brave the forest in the night to come to a clearing and pray. Eventually a white stag with candles on its antlers came to guide them through the dark and would stop in a particular clearing, refusing to move further. When the king learned of this, he thought there was no way a church could be built there since it was by the oft-flooded riverbanks. Then angels came down bearing a rope to mark the spot, and of course the church was built there. Later the two sisters each became abbesses of the church at different times. Under each twin church are fascinating crypt-museums with local religious history. We marvel at the Chagall windows and then meet up with Aidan for a raclette lunch. In the afternoon we take him back to the churches and then, outside the Grossmunster, the others try to teach me to ride a bike. It does not go well. Many people come by and laugh––some more openly than others. I am in hysterics and eventually call it quits.

The next day I leave the others behind and take a bus and a train back into the city. I explore the museum’s collections for most of the morning and then go exploring again. I return to the local raclette restaurant for more cheese and on the way there get a 100 franc ticket for losing my bus pass. Ouch. When I finally get to the restaurant, the lady recognizes me from yesterday. Double ouch. I spend some time knitting by the water before I visit the Zurich Opernhaus to see the Zurich Ballet perform a new interpretation of Romeo & Julia(et). My father gifted me tickets as a father’s day gift (I tried to say that’s not how father’s day gifts generally work but he insisted and I’m not one to say no to the ballet). The choreography, the costuming, and the set are modern, fresh, and stunning.

I take a rest day, do some laundry by hand in the bathtub because the washing machine seems to be broken. My clothes dry almost instantly in the thick heat. I explore the little town, have a German pastry at a bakery and grab some food at the Aldi to make dinner. Since it’s so expensive here, we decided to save some by splitting a small rental apartment in a small German town on the border and cook at home. I make a pot of shakshuka for dinner while the others tell me about their hike through the alps.

On day fourteen, our halfway point, I visit the Lindt Home of Chocolate––an experience I can only describe as Swiss Willy Wonka’s factory. I’m augustus glooping, I text the others as I walk around diagrams of chocolate machines to study their engineering, simulate ancient methods of chocolate making, and sample my weight in specialty chocolates. I try to bring some back for the others but the heatwave liquifies them in my bag before I get to them.

We spend the evening on a train to Luxembourg. I realize the reception closes before we are off the train to collect the keys to the apartment, so I call and ask how else we can check in. You can check in in the morning, the woman tells me. But where will we sleep? I ask. Inside, of course, she responds. There’s no lock? I ask. Of course not, she says, it’s a tent. What? It’s… a tent? With no lock? It turns out what we thought was glamping was in fact a large tent.

I wake up in a pool of my sweat. It must be at least ninety degrees. I get up to check my phone. In fact it’s 99º, and about ten or fifteen degrees hotter inside the tent. Cool. I feel sweat pouring down every inch of my body. The heat is still and suffocating. I drench my shirt in cold water under the faucet and put it back on––momentary relief. We decide to take a forest hike to cool off; it must be at least a little nicer under the trees, we think. After a quick ice cream stop, we take a bus to the trail head and play around in the water park. We grab lunch at a little restaurant there and then head off. We spend the day bathing in a waterfall and creek along the trail, ice-cold and so refreshing against the heat. We end up heading home early because torrential rain comes to relieve us of the sun. It takes us four hours to get back because Chey (bless her) is even worse at reading a map than I am.

In the middle of the night two of Chey’s friends join us from their study abroad in France. We spend the day in the city, easily accessible through public transport despite our rustic accomodation. We start at another yarn store to buy Cheyenne some knitting needles so we can both knit on the trains. The place has even more fabulous yarns on clearance, this time for 3 euros. I can’t resist; I buy two more skeins. Then we go to the coffee shop next door where I put the others onto a drink I love and can hardly ever find abroad––espresso tonic. The response is mixed. The new girls need a backpack and I know just the place. I take them to Decathlon and we all take another shopping break.

Then I split off to visit the church and castle. I walk around the balcony to a view of a gorgeous building that was, at different times, a monastery, a church, an orphanage, a prison, a nazi occupation center, and now is a museum. I meet back up with the group for mezzes at a Michelin recommended restaurant. Chey and I finish off the day with ice cream sundaes at the campsite.

Day seventeen is a travel day: Luxembourg to Amsterdam, with a layover in Belgium. Amsterdam has a significant Moroccan immigrant population so almost everyone we’ve met as of our first day here has been Moroccan. During the first Uber from the train station to the hotel, a friendly driver is eager to tell us about the Moroccan neighborhood in which we are staying. He pulls up to some traffic and says we wait in no line as though deciding out loud. Before I know what’s happening the driver has pulled into the tram tracks and moves to tail the tram to the hotel. We are terrified while he makes casual conversation––I like this restaurant, good pizza for 8 euros.

After surviving the journey to the hotel, we go to the pizza place the driver recommended. Well, it’s more of a kebab place that has pizza but as promised the pizza is 8 euros and we’re not ones to complain about cheap food. It was indeed very good pizza. We capitulate our options for the evening before Aidan suggests seeing the MJ biopic at the royal theatre. We all agree and soon thereafter find ourselves in a gilded building with Chinese art all around us and couches in the screening room. We have some sangria and hum along to Thriller.

After the movie we explore the city by night before taking another Uber home. Before long, a small white car with club music shaking the windows pulls up to the pickup spot. We tentatively ask if he is here for us. Why, of course he is. We clamor in and the driver asks if we like the music. He is livestreaming some sort of DJ set, all English and Latin music. We nod––after all, what kind of 305ers would we be if we didn’t like Pitbull? The driver takes this as approval and dials the music to 100. We ask him if he’s ever been to Miami. I AM SYRIAN I KNOW WHAT NONE OF THIS MEANS I ONLY KNOW BOOM BOOM!! he responds enthusiastically.

We have tickets to see the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam, so the next morning we find ourselves standing at the base of a Portuguese synagogue whose design is inspired by a possible floorplan of the temple in Jerusalem. It’s gorgeous––gold leather and bronze furnishings. We take an audio tour, supplemented by my explanations of the synagogue’s layout. Generally American synagogues face east, but here we’re facing southwest towards Jerusalem. That’s the women’s gallery. Contrary to popular explanations, the women’s gallery is not here because women are less holy but because we have unique mitzvas.

The tour takes us through the main and winter synagogues, chevruta spaces, mourning rooms with a “no entrance for Cohens” sign tacked on the doors (generally members of the rabbinic class are not permitted in the space meant for the washing of the body in Sephardic tradition, the audio guide explains), and the Mikveh. I take issue with the audio guide’s explanation of the mikveh as a space women visit to “become clean for their husbands.” Going to the Mikveh is a mitzvah one completes for themself––water is a spiritual threshold in the Jewish tradition, I argue.

We have a nice Italian lunch and stroopwafel ice cream for dessert. Then I split off from the others to visit the royal palace and a lovely gothic post office-turned-mall. I spend the evening in the expansive central park, knitting and updating my friends at home on my whereabouts.

Morocco won a world cup match against the Netherlands around 5am last night, and Aidan was up watching them celebrate in the streets. It was absolute craziness, he tells us later––smoke bombs, motorcycles, kids on shoulders. Thus he is still asleep in the morning, so Chey and I grab a breakfast of dutch apple pie before heading to the Rijksmuseum. Chey spends all day at the Rijks (she tells me later she spent six hours on the first two floors and had to speedrun the rest of the building before they threw her out and closed up). Medieval art isn’t exactly my speed, so I spend a few hours there and move on to see the other museums Amsterdam has to offer.

I try to visit the Van Gogh museum but they’re sold out for the day. I buy tickets for tomorrow and visit MoCo instead. It’s small but well-curated and powerful. The art is incredible. I’m not usually big on Banksy but their collection is admittedly impressive. I tour the rest of the building, spending the next two hours on the three floors of the small house the collection occupies. I cry at Keith Haring, as I always do. I cry at Robbie Williams. I cry a lot in general. Something about contemporary art does that to me. I spend the rest of the evening in the nine streets, or the shopping district, exploring cute boutiques and shops.

I spend the next morning alone, once more the only one awake and ready to explore. I visit the Anne Frank house but can’t go inside, having failed to acquire tickets when I tried last month. As expected, I cry. I read all the stopelsteine along her street and leave a stone on the base of her statue. I don’t think it looks much like her but I pay my respects anyway.

On my way to the Van Gogh museum I pass through the shopping district again. I didn’t buy the cute clogs I saw the first time I was here and have been severely regretting it ever since. They were on clearance for fifteen euros, a deep blue vegan leather with comfortable rubber soles. I returned yesterday to a closed store, but today the boutique is open and I sweep my clogs off the shelf immediately. The woman at the counter compliments my choice, showing me her own matching gray clogs. They are so comfortable, she reassures me. I hurry to my time slot to see the Van Gogh museum. I take a self-paced tour, intended to be ninety minutes. Two hours pass, and then three. I cry at Almond Blossoms, at Wheatfield With Crows (scarily reminiscent of my years in Michigan), at Tree Roots. Van Gogh, like most of Amsterdam so far, strikes a chord with me. I stay until I am informed by a tired employee that I have stayed too long and the museum is closing.

I go off exploring afterwards towards a new area of town. I have a lovely dinner at a local restaurant with vegetarian spins on Dutch classics. The waitress, a Peruvian woman who is excited to learn I also speak Spanish, tells me about the street festival happening today to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of slaves. That explains the throngs of people and music and street vendors I had to push through to get here. I end the day at Satellite Sports Bar with the others and their friend who came to visit from Copenhagen watching a world cup match.

The next day brings a train to Hannover, a midsize city in Germany we are visiting because the Roshers’ grandmother grew up there. Chey and I run off to have a Bavarian dinner––beer, jager schnitzel, spätzle, pretzels. In the morning Chey and I take the tram downtown while the boys sleep in again. We visit the old town, see a protest. It’s cold enough here that we have to stop into a store so I can buy a pair of pants. Then we follow a painted red path to all the historical monuments around town. We want to see the old town hall, but it seems someone is getting married there, so we give them their space. We stop into a busy cafe for afternoon tea and cake. The portions here are absolutely huge––at breakfast I had a coffee the size of my head––so we split a piece of traditional German cheesecake with fresh cream. Then we follow the red thread to the gorgeous new town hall overlooking a historic park with a lake. At least seven weddings are happening here today. We take a slanted elevator to the top of the dome for a panoramic view of the city, then finish the day with gigantic shawarma sandwiches.

After a mid-morning train to Berlin and checking into our hostel, Chey and I go for a lunch/dinner of ramen and a late night dessert of tiramisu at the little italian place by the hostel.

First on our itinerary for Berlin is the Boros Collection, a former nazi bunker (the Reichsbahnbunker Friedrichstraße) which over the course of half a century was also used as a red army war prison, textile warehouse, storage for imported tropical fruit from Cuba, electro club, rogue art and theatre shows, and now home of the private collection of the Boros family. A family friend who works in the art business recommended we take a tour, and so spend our first morning inside the bunker. The guide talks us through the art and history of the building. It is a haunting, suffocating air that greets us inside the bunker and follows us around all morning. I touch the original oak handlebars. I marvel at the art. All of it is incredible. The guide talks about myth and legend and philosophy.

Inside a reflective glass octagon, I watch myself watching myself inside the art on the wall behind me. The scene of the portrait is violent in its aftermath: danger looming but never witnessed. The guide describes the room as a critique of Foucault’s panopticon: the viewer becomes the witness and the surveilled. You cannot look away. You can look at the art directly, or you can turn, placing yourself in the frame.

I have always been fascinated by Foucault’s Power/Knowledge, the internalised coercion of social structures. I think more about Foucault on an afternoon walking tour of the city. It’s hard not to consider and reconsider the social consequences of history when you stand and live inside of it. In these cities, I am confronted with historiographies of exile and mass murder and constantly rising tension. People live here. It’s hard to imagine learning to walk and speak in such a place, among such blunt recognition of what has happened here. Walking every day along the stumbling stone. The names, even, are discomposing: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Topography of Terrors, Palace of Tears. I imagine learning to speak a language of violence. We produce our own histories, and in a certain way they produce us. How do we emerge if not from our own history?

I try to take a morning tour of the jewish quarter. I wait and wait at the meet up spot and when no one shows, I call the guide. Oh, the man says, I’m sorry. The tour was canceled––you were the only one that signed up. How poetic. Instead I decide to just walk around the area by myself. I see the historic cemetery, more stopelsteine, and stop to look at public art. Or rather, I stop to look at nothing. It’s called the Missing House, a memorial to all the homes of jews bombed and destroyed. The monument itself is an empty space where someone’s home once was. The building was split down the middle and half crumbled into rubble after an air raid, and between where two new buildings stand is a line of exposed brick and the names and occupations of the people who lived there. Then I follow the golden dome to the New Synagogue, also destroyed during the war but saved from burning completely by a police officer on Kristallnaght. Small parts are original, from the 1800s. Everything else is a reconstruction. We lose so much to our own violence. Who knows what’s been erased?

In the afternoon I meet up with the others to take a walking tour of the history of communism and socialism in Berlin, told through traces of art and propaganda that remain on the walls of the city. The tour is three hours long and we are fascinated the whole time. By the end we are exhausted and starving. Aidan finds a nearby vegan Thai restaurant on the Michelin guide (I’ve learned he has a knack for finding great, cheap restaurants) and then we try tiramisu ice cream at the place next door. We finish the evening at a pub to watch the world cup.

We wake up exhausted from the long walk and the late game, so we sleep in a bit before Chey and I run off. We try an incredible breakfast club right by the hostel and then spend the day shopping. We peruse a well-stocked thrift, local boutiques, and a giant craft store where I find a thousand varieties of yarn including a glow-in-the-dark skein which comes home with me. We have a chill evening at Holzmarkt, a unique area on the river not far from the East Side Gallery. It feels almost post-apocalyptic––spray-painted shacks and canopies surround various picnic tables, a tattoo shop, several bars, little restaurants, and a mini-disco. We hang out at the biergarten and watch the Argentina v Egypt game, cheering and gasping alongside two or three dozen Berliners.

Our penultimate day in Berlin brings us to the New National Gallery, which has five excellent exhibits on show. My favorite is Gerhard Richter’s 100 Works for Berlin, which indeed contains one hundred works for Berlin. I borrow some words from Staatliche Museen zu Berlin to describe it:

“The central work in the exhibition is the series Birkenau (2014), consisting of four large-format, abstract paintings. Birkenau is the result of Richter’s long and in-depth engagement with the Holocaust and the possibilities of representing it. The works are based on four photographs taken in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, which the artist transposed with charcoal and oil paint to four canvases before gradually painting over them abstractly. With each layer of paint, the depiction of the original drawing disappeared a little more, until it eventually became invisible. The work also includes a large four-part mirror, which is positioned opposite the four Birkenau canvases, creating another level of reflection.”

The exhibit is gripping. I think of my own family, their murders at the same place the photos depict. I think of the families of everyone in the photographs. Hundreds of families. The audio guide plays a frequency to describe the horrors; to replicate the number seven million. Can art capture it? I wonder this because I myself struggle to understand the gravity of it. I think of standing at the base of the reichstag, which today bears no scorch marks. No indication of what it once meant. Is it better to be surrounded by monuments of our disasters or to clean the ash off the buildings?

I think more about this over a dinner of traditional German potato soup, cheeses, and blonde beer mixed with orange juice. I try the clubs to take a break from thinking about it but do not succeed. Even the party culture emerges from travesty; the bareness of the city after the fall of the wall gave it the physical space to become something almost-new in its own ruins. These walls, too, bear the marks of their past. The clubs take up old factories, refineries, and bunkers. This, I am told, is because after the wall fell artists and squatters moved in on the now-abandoned and dirt cheap city, bringing techno records from the west and expanding into the space they found in the east. Someone described it to me as a symbol of reunification: a fusion of the west and east into a new era for the city. How much ruin does it take for us to reinvent ourselves? I think of the earthquakes in my motherland, of the politics in the US tearing open like a valve of the heart; always danger looming. Must we tear apart to become something better?

I return to the breakfast club I so enjoy and then head downtown. It’s my last day in Berlin, and at large in Europe. There in the center of Mitte I find the Berliner Dom, or the Berlin Cathedral. I don’t have much time to spend inside but I marvel at the gold and green, the painted ceilings, and the baroque masterpieces sprawled across the dome. Then I visit the site of the first prussian palace, blown up by the soviets and turned into the “people’s palace,” then demolished once more and turned into a replica of the first palace. It’s now a public museum. In the afternoon I meet with a friend of my mom’s for apple strudel and then a tour of the public art around the city. We end at the East Side Gallery, take selfies in front of the portrait of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing (whose actual title is My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love), then spend the evening at a food market in a residential area which reminds me a little of Budapest.

At three in the morning, we begin our journey home: a train to the airport just outside Berlin, then a flight to Warsaw, then a ten or so hour flight to Miami. I listen back to all the episodes of my favorite podcast from the last two years. I knit. I write. For the life of me I can’t seem to sleep. The bathroom of the airplane has a pink flower in a small vial attached to the mirror. I notice this on my third lap around the plane in my desperate attempts to keep myself occupied. My friend starts and ends her ankle surgery while I’m on the flight, and her mother texts me updates and videos of her high on anesthesia. After we finally land, I lose the others in customs. My father picks me up from the airport. The trip ends without a goodbye.

tunnels in Luxembourg, the Rijks, MoCo; the Van Gogh, Thai vegan dinner, flight home