The Last Return 20

[Photo is at Remscheid railway station looking out onto a free multi-storeyed carpark with poster on fence advertising a church service ‘with Remscheid Romanticism’.]

Wednesday 15^th May

8.30 am, I catch the S6 train from Bad Vilbel to Frankfurt, joining the commuters smiling or frowning into their screens. B. and I have split up for ten days to visit our relatives. I’m on the way north-west to Remscheid in Germany’s old-industrial heartland of Nordrhein-Westphalen to visit my last remaining known relative anywhere E., my ninety-one-year-old second cousin, childless, one-time primary-school teacher. (I have a total absence of close relatives because both my parents and I had no siblings, and because the Russian revolution and its Soviet era aftermath wiped out any knowledge of paternal relatives in Belarus).

At the bookshop in the Central Station in Frankfurt I pick up Byung-Chul Hans’ ‘Philosophy des Zen-Buddhismus’ (Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, gist: in Zen there is nothing ‘ultimate’ grounding, or hidden behind, appearances, only inner-outer vastness/emptiness) and current Frankfurt-School-professor Axel Honneth’s ‘Die Idee des Sozialismus’ (The Idea of Socialism is ‘soziale Freiheit’, ‘social freedom’, seen as a historical process of social and moral progress through social struggles and as the democratic-revolutionary synthesis of bourgeois liberty and fraternity/solidarity/equality).

I take the ICE north-west to Cologne, with one necessary change at Solingen in order to get to Remscheid. From Mainz onwards we move up the western bank of the Rhine. Many vineyards on incredibly steep slopes; I imagine how much more laborious the working of such vineyards must be. There is still quite a bit of woodland on the steepest slopes and old castles on every other hill from which robber-barons extorted their tolls on all Rhine travel. Roads and houses are squashed in between river and slope or in narrow valleys branching off to the sides. A few freight barges ply the river, as do small tourist cruise ships moving down the middle.

We fly past Bacharach, Boppard, Rhens, Koblenz, after which the steep hills begin to flatten out and the alluvial plain widens. Then it’s past swank Bonn, the ex-capital, and Brühl, after which the industrial zones begin: the usual high-voltage powerlines, plastic-covered fields and polytunnels, autobahns and Schrebergärten (small garden allotments for the working classes). In Cologne the view from the train is all industrial desolation and, much as I strain my neck, manage to catch no glimpse of the famed cathedral as we cross the Rhine.

Remscheid Hauptbahnhof. A cold wind blows over the wide, desolate expanse of concrete looking out toward a free multi-storey carpark. A poster on the fence ironically advertises a Friday-evening church service imbued with ‘Remscheid Romanticism’. A 50-cent coin at the station’s toilet door fails to open it, so I’ll have to hold it in. People look poorer, more harrowed, care- and work-worn working class. Consulting several bus schedules at the bus station, I finally find the 655 bus to the suburb (ex-village) of Lennep where E. lives, and the driver kindly helps me find the stop nearest to her street. After I get off, I walk around and find there are about four street sections all called Max-Planck-Strasse, so it takes a while and a phone call before I finally find her house number 29, made somewhat more difficult by the missing 9.

E. is thrilled to see me. It’s been sixteen years since we last saw each other when I drove up to see her from Frankfurt by hire-car. Now ninety-one, she is wheelchair-bound, has water in her legs and no more feeling in her fingers. She has a live-in carer from Poland, a grandmother herself who will only stay for two to four weeks and then be replaced by another, usually also Polish, carer. She is about to leave tomorrow. E. tells me that 70% of the costs of her home care are borne by a state fund for ex-teachers and the rest by private insurance.

E., who has no children, has left the management of all her financial matters and the inheritance of her house to her niece and nephew. However, she still worries and feels a sense of loss of control over her life and finances. She still has good eyesight and mental acumen, but says she finds it hard to concentrate and immerse herself in a book, often feeling lonely and bored, with nothing to do. She has been wondering whether to move to an aged-care home. Sometime an old priest friend comes to visit (E. is a devout Catholic and was very active in her local church). She insists on showing me lengthy, badly made videos of the priest as a missionary in Papua New Guinea in which he himself features a lot but the locals only make a fleeting, desultory appearance.

Then there’s strawberry torte and coffee, and we spend the next hour or so poring over her family photo albums together. I take some phone-photos of the photos of our common ancestors I hadn’t seen before. E. says that she never understood why my mother had never answered her letters once she had moved to Australia after my father died twelve years ago; I say nothing, don’t make up any fake excuse, knowing of my mother’s utilitarian ego-centrism towards people and my vain attempts to get her to write back to E. despite having professed a close relationship when she visited E. and her late husband with my father.

E. suddenly says that she hopes she might pass away soon and then see all her loved ones and friends in heaven again. She asks me if I believe in that too. I say I don’t. After a pause she then says she sometimes asks herself whether everything she has always believed as a devout Christian is really true. I feel a little awkward, don’t really know what to say; I find myself saying that perhaps the priest might usually be the person to discuss this with. To my surprise she replies: ‘he doesn’t really know either, does he?’

The late afternoon sunlight is streaming through the sheer curtains. It is very quiet now. We are becoming still. I suggest that perhaps some centering of the mind on the body, for example through progressively relaxing parts of the body and becoming aware of one’s breathing, might be helpful in slowing down the mind-talk and worrying. (Something I also should generally do more than I do). I stop talking for a while and then draw attention to the stillness now present. Then I just continue practising being fully present to her as she talks, which mostly succeeds.

The afternoon fading, I have to think about finding my booked hotel back in Remscheid before it gets too dark, and prepare to leave. I forget to take a last selfie with her. We hug for the last time, and I leave with a pang inside and a last glimpse of her grey hair. As Rilke notes somewhere in the Duino Elegies, we always seem to be waving farewell to something or someone. Not too long now, and I will be in her position.

Waiting at the stop for a bus back to Remscheid, a mumbling woman in a headscarf, foreign-looking, approaches me and asks me something about the time, then suddenly grabs my left hand to look at my watch. Momentary fears of being robbed or pickpocketed. I tell her the time and when the bus will be arriving according to the bus schedule at the stop. All good. A lonely young boy is bouncing a ball in the yard opposite.

I’ve booked a hotel room in Remscheid over the phone, but not sure how to get there. I ask some friendly women in the bus and they tell me where to best get off. Dusk has fallen. I find the small, inconspicuous Hotel Noll in the deserted main pedestrian zone. It’s after-hours, so at the glass entrance door I tap in the code numbers given to me over the phone and am relieved to get my key out of a box and enter.

The room is cosy enough, big bed, with a print of Franz Marc’s expressionist ‘Tower of Blue Horses’ aesthetically, and somehow comfortingly, gracing a light-blue wall. The calm, the silence is, surprisingly, deep. No noises from neighbouring rooms at all. Perhaps I’m almost alone in the hotel. The view out the window is over a flat monotonous landscape, the usual urban sprawl with some far-off woodland on the horizon.

~ by Peter Lach-Newinsky on August 21, 2021.