Everyday Soundtrack
It’s six weeks now since I moved to this other part of town. Into an apartment near the train station. With a kitchen window view to the incoming and outgoing trains. To the passengers, walking slow. Walking fast. Catching the train. Coming back from the city. Waiting for a pickup. Stop and go. Headphones on or mobile in hand, many, each in their own world. Dressed-up. In Jogging trousers. Solo. In groups. Business people. Teenagers. Workers. Like waves, in and out. In and out.
The trains arrive and go to the full hour. That’s also when the church bells ring. Every hour, on the hour, first high, then low. Starting at six in the morning, ending at ten in the evening. Ding ding ding ding ding ding—dong dong dong dong dong dong: wake of the day. Since when? I wonder. Maybe since centuries. Since the time not everyone had a wristwatch, an alarm clock, a life timed by digital numbers.
Opposite the train station is the “Bücherei”—the library. The quiet home of books. Just 60 steps away. Thousands of them. Novels, Biographies, DIY-Books, Children’s books, a small shelf of poetry, too. And the heavy books: the earth, the universe, the ocean: each in about a pound. A book of countries of the world, four to six pages to each. It makes me remember my school atlas, the one that made it through moves and places, through the cold war and the millennium crossing. It’s here in the cupboard. In it, Germany still is two states, Yugoslavia is one, and to the East, it’s the Soviet Union.
So yes. Books. The new publications, and the new editions, the knowledge of the world. Coming and going to this town, to this library. Like passengers, too. Read, half-read, brought back. And beyond the library shelves: piled boxes of books dropped off, donated. “Too much,” the librarian says. “Where should we put all of them, who should read all this?”
Some houses further, the house with the men on the balcony who always seem to be there, lingering. It takes some time for me to get it, the atmosphere, the look in their eyes: they are from Ukraine. Stranded, here. Two borders from their home. A home that maybe once was a bit like this place: houses, train station, a library with too many books, a church with hourly bells. The routine of days, going and going. Until it was broken.
I walk on, past the official graffiti-mural on a wall: old and new trains, leading from night to day, two words on top: “Reisen verbindet”—“Travel connects”. Some meters further, the real graffiti, unreadable, large, sprayed over and over.
The church bell goes once: quarter hour.
The next train arrives.
Soundtrack of my life, of this place, here, now.
How to cite: Lang, Dorothee. “Just Another Day: Dorothee Lang.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/dorothee-lang.
Dorothee Lang is into roads, stories, places, crossings, and all the things they lead and connect to. She lives in Germany, is one of the authors of Worlds Apart, and the founding editor of BluePrintReview.ng.
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