It seemed fitting that we rode into Germany on the train rather than descend upon her from the sky. Trains take us through the back door of cities, through the industry and graffiti and clutter that better guests never see. In our case, the train is pulling east but we are facing west. Backwards. Looking towards France. And we are hidden behind screens of trees and the lush greens of a far too wet spring. Half of the time, we are hidden in a ditch, emerging to see white flashes of sheep or cows or glimpsing the puddle of a village between gently sloping fields, always the steeple in the center.
I ride backwards searching for anything old. Old building. Old tree. And I think that if I knew what to look for, I would see it: the scars, tracks, fox holes, trenches, mortar craters that surely lie beneath Cezanne’s patchwork pastoral. Dark clouds move over and beyond us, leaving us with pieces of bright sunlight. How long do they last in the earth, the boots prints of history? I still flinch when women are slapped on television or in the movies and it has been decades since anyone has lifted a hand towards my face. How long will the earth flinch? How long before the fields forget the weight of the tanks.
We are riding backwards into Germany. Beyond a horse in a backyard. A woman on a bicycle racing down a dirt lane. Who parachuted into this patch of wood? Who crawled arm over arm in the shallow water? Who hid, trembling, already found, already dead? Drawn into the past, this time we are armed with what we now know, what we did not know then, towards the dark mines of war and murder. Mining for precious fragments of light that might be left: truth, memory, meaning, hope, remembrance.