Dr Kramer - Ground Report

About a week after one of those what-are-you-doing-after-all-these-years email drops into the basket, I find myself struggling for an answer. Would that I had a neat one-liner of a career! Engineer! Marketing manager! Drug-addled whore! Cop! Dropout and copout! None-of-the-above is ticked with a tut-tut and I tinkle at keyboard fruitlessly. I am many things and most of them are unfortunately more than a polite epithet.
Reality, as it is wont to do, resembles a Wednesday afternoon. Actually it is evening but with early July refusing to die easily, the afternoon marches on until all sensible people have dulled their senses with a gutful of abendbrot. I stand before the door of Dr Kramer. Post-reunification whimsy (read: money) has tarted up these teutonically-frowning blocks to a shade of yellow. Among the locals, however, reality dies harder: this is the wrong side of town often described as the ‘Soviet quarter’. Surely none of them have been to Russia lately and dragged their feet through the rubble of outer Yoshkar-Ola or the pseudo-Nordic concrete forests of Petrozavodsk where vodka bottles (empty!) rain through a mist itself heavily pregnant with rain. By comparison Lobeda is a sea breeze.
 I can hear, through the glass door, through the wall, up a flight of stairs, a door-buzzer buzzing. I wait. Rush-hour rattles its frustrated sabre behind me on the main road. Nobody comes. The door remains steadfastly shut. I remain holding a locked bicycle. It is the same bicycle I dragged home from the festival on the bridge on Saturday; the same I dragged drown to the tram-stop today; the same I held uselessly as the tram-driver sped Germanly past as I realised I was standing at something that just looked like a tram stop; the same I dragged two blocks to the main station with car drivers staring at me, one finger on the ‘he’s just a dickhead foreigner’ button and another twitching over ‘surely he might have stolen it oh my’; the same one I lugged onto number 5 tram destined for Lobeda-Ost; the same one for which I had to buy a ticket: I might need an Einzelfahrt, but my shackled contraption also needs a Kinder-Einzelfahrt.
Thus fahrted, we have arrived at Lobeda-Ost. Dr Kramer is not home.
  I still have no idea what happened to the key. I tried hacking the cable with one of the mysterious implements in the garden shed, without success. Dr Kramer, however, said she had a neighbour with a thingy and that any stubborn cable could be banished forthwith. I walked for a few days. When I got tired on trudging through rain I decided to take her up. An appointment was made. Even in these reaches of an industrial city pumping out anonymous pharmaceuticals for, probably and ironically, cyclists, arrangements must be precise. So, tomorrow 6pm. I have been granted leave to come.
Today, 6pm. Thus I stand, careerless, answerless, keyless, in front of an east German apartment block holding a might-be-stolen bicycle. A few passers-by look at me but I’m perhaps paranoid. They are far more interested in the pile of rubbish in front of the bins. It’s the time of year when households may dispose of items that won’t fit in the usual collection bins.
  Here it’s more of a market. A man with a walking stick jabs it at a pile of mattresses as if probing for a good reflex. A woman attached to a pram detaches herself for a few minutes to pick through a cardboard box of under-the-sink throwaways. The pram wails and she reattaches herself and her salad-bowl bounty. Two girls drag a suitcase as big as themselves and try to heave it on the pile. I listen for their little brother inside but there is nothing. Buzz again. Nothing. No kid bro, no Kramer.
I walk for a while. Further up the street there’s more of the same. More sullen apartments frowning squarishly at traffic, more car parks wishing they were playgrounds, more broken playgrounds wishing they were playgrounds, even more junk piled on and upon itself. Imagine the old bazaar of Cairo collapsed into about fifty square metres. Broken chairs and hammer-dismantled desks form an abstract sculpture to rival the train-smash of stainless steel in the plaza in front of the university. A dog sniffs at child’s cot and decides it’s not worth peeing on.
 I peer from the embankment toward Dr Kramer’s window. There is no sign of movement. I heard that she hadn’t been well. The only movement is around the junk mountain. A truck pulls up and a man with a belly the size of the front cabin rolls out. He and his offsider load up a passable sofa missing the cushions. Two ladies wearing the same check-coloured pants dive into an old man’s box the minute it hits the ground. They find no more pants but are somewhat interested in a mirror shaped like Spain and featuring gilded bull-horns.
I buzz again. The sound echoes down the stairwell. I expect to be arrested any minute for hawking stolen bicycles door-to-door but there is still nothing. A pair of jeans almost containing a middle-aged blonde woman makes another offering at Temple Of Refuse. The dog sniffs again and decides that 80’s rock, eBay or no eBay, is decidely worth pissing on. I could almost agree as I remember the first time I rode a bicycle. You know, Christmas morning, the surprise you knew was there all along gets wheeled out and the family gets to watch you stutter and kick at the pedals as they swing within reach of spindly legs. Actually I was confident even on that first ride of how to ride. What terrified me was how to get off. Apply pressure to brakes, bike slows, and … ???
  And after an hour Dr Kramer is still not at home. I decide to try the next entry door and its ten doorbells. I know that one of her friends lives there and she may be visiting. I don’t know his name. Scratch through rubble of pidgin German and mangled bookshelves and foreign foreigner words to say after buzz "Halo, ich bin nobody, I’m looking for the man from Saxon-Anhalt who has just moved in and hasn’t put his name on the doorbells yet who I think lives on the second floor who is a friend of Dr Kramer."
Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
 The door opens.
I climb two flight of stairs. Haris appears for a moment and appears flustered, tossing up whether to invite me in for brandy or shout in my face that he asked for no catalogues. Dr Kramer appears from behind him and slips down the stairs with me. She goes in to her apartment building. I drag the hamstrung bike with me up to the landing. I back around and go down again as she awakens the man from next door. He looks like a professional sausage eater. In the basement he mutters a few times until he has his angle grinder connected.
  There is a shower of sparks and Dr Kramer jumps back. The scarf slips momentarily from her neck. I see the scar wrapped around her throat.
The old lock peels away in an instant. Herr Wurst appears grumpily satisfied and I thank him for his help. The rear wheel moves freely now and I can pull the bike up to the foyer at ground level. Dr Kramer stands there, impassive. She has her hands by her sides and is wearing check pants. She doesn’t ask me to stay.
  I ride off down the hill. I ride past apartments stacked on apartments lumped on 1960’s ideas of suburban efficiency. I spin past more treasure troves of rubbish being fondled by one-handed beggars. I get further from the woman who had a cancer in the side of throat and still had enough presence of mind to help me exorcise a kanker from rear wheel of a bicycle I didn’t like much anyway.
Is this enough, my old-school friends? Have I become a person to you now in the liberation of a lame bike? When I get to the bottom of the hill the sun has almost set through rain and the stubborn, twilight-murdering plains of Thuringia. You can pick through the last twenty years of my life and what will you find, belligerent treasure-hunters you? Pick cherries, pick old fish tanks for planting maiden-hair ferns, see if I care. Everything dies hard here, even the anonymous, and surely always will.

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