Roland looked at me in despair. Ich finde den Bahnhof einfach nicht.'

I replied, confused, 'Wir sind grad am Schild vorbeigefahren. Dort stand ganz klar...'

It hit me. The sign for the railway station had been clear. It said, in large, friendly letters, Gare. Which was French. Which Roland didn't speak. This linguistic confusion is the reason why we arrived at the Luxemburg baggage claim exactly 15 minutes too late. But thereby hangs a tale.

The story starts the previous summer, when I, a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, prepared to go and spend a year abroad studying Germanistik at the University of Bonn. My parents were keen to help.

'Let's see,' said my dad. 'You land in Luxemburg, then travel south to Bonn. . . '

'No, north,' I replied.

'South,' my dad insisted.

'No, Dad, I just looked it up,' I was firm.

'But I was there!' My dad was sure about this. After all, he had a campaign ribbon from the conquest of the Rhineland in 1945.

'They moved it, dear.' My mom had had enough. We dropped the subject and went on to arguing about whether I needed to pack enough bath soap for a year's sojourn. I tried to explain that I was pretty sure the supply issues had been solved in the intervening 30 years, but he wasn't convinced. My sister didn't help by suggesting over the phone that some of our school friends had brought their own toilet paper during their childhood summers with the relatives in Germany.

'That was in the 50s and 60s,' I protested. 'It's the 70s now. I am sure they have all the bathroom supplies you could ask for.' Eventually, everybody subsided on the issue of toiletries. But then my mom bought me a suitcase.

My mom had been very scientific about this, although not very practical. She'd found out the permissible dimensions of a suitcase according to the airlines of the time and bought the largest one possible. This thing was big. It had soft sides and zippers and a lock and key. It was very, very plaid.

Fully loaded, this monster weighed fifty pounds. I am, er, vertically challenged. I would have much preferred two smaller suitcases and a balanced load but hey, that was the least of my problems – which included the fact that my passport and visa had not yet arrived. Children, stop thinking that we had cell phones back then. We didn't even have computers. Okay, major institutions had computers. The airport had computers. But their mainframes were the size of city blocks. If I wanted a visa, I had to send my passport by snail mail. It lived up to its name. My passport and visa arrived at the door exactly two hours before I was due to leave by plane. Good thing the Elmira-Corning airport was only ten minutes away.

Bad thing about the Elmira-Corning airport was that, on this auspicious day, the one on which I was to embark on my big transatlantic adventure, the runway was blocked by a disabled plane. Yes, the runway. No problem: we were bused to nearby Binghamton and flew from there to New York City. I had a nice 24-hour stopover in Reykjavik.

The Suitcase turned out to be every bit as unwieldy as I had feared and contributed to the exhaustion of the next few days. By the time I finally found a room to rent in Bonn, I was really glad to shove the monster on top of the wardrobe. Its use was relegated to 'extra storage space'. For short trips, I went out and purchased a small bag from that useful shop Frau Schleifenbaum pronounced 'Vole-Vort'. Finding the familiar Woolworth's sign around the corner from Beethoven's birthplace was merely one of the ten thousand delights of that awesome year. I learned more in ten months than I had in my first 21 years.

I made a lot of trips that year: to southern Germany, where I walked the walls of Rothenburg and visited the Alps on New Year's Day and saw Munich and Nuremberg. To Berlin, east and west. To London, where I had lunch in Buckingham Palace with one of the footmen and saw Shakespeare plays in the West End. I even visited far-famed Gelsenkirchen and lots of places whose names ended in -dorf. I learned half a dozen dead languages and toured dozens of churches and monasteries. And all that time, the Suitcase stayed home in its niche on the other bank of the Rhein. Unlike Rincewind's Luggage, it didn't have feet, or even wheels.

August came, and I had to bid a reluctant farewell to my friends and the Rhein. I was due back on the Three Rivers in September with a master's degree to finish and some classes to teach. I mailed all the books I'd acquired – and I packed that suitcase. My friend Roland, who was 18, had just got his licence and a new car he was proud of. He offered to drive me to Luxemburg (south, Dad) to catch the plane. Since his girlfriend (my friend, too) Claudia was going along, the three of us would just fit into his VW with my giant suitcase.

However, my American friend Chuck had other ideas. Chuck, also a student in Bonn, was dying to see what he called The Grand Duchy of Fenwick. This was a reference to a Peter Sellers movie based on a Leonard Wibberley novel, called The Mouse That Roared. That Chuck, a theologian in spe, was keen to travel to Luxemburg for this reason shows you what a dork he was. Also, he was very insistent.

'We can't take you,' I said with firm regret. 'There's only room for the four of us in the car – Roland, Claudia, me, and my suitcase.'

'But here's the thing,' Chuck said, pulling a railway timetable out of the briefcase he carried absolutely everywhere. 'You can ship the suitcase ahead – by train!' He grinned at the elegance of it. 'All you have to do is pick it up at the station on the way to the airport. No schlepping.'

At my dubious look, he added persuasively, 'I'll pay for the shipping.'

The weather was beautiful. The drive was glorious. We had a lovely lunch in Luxemburg. We dropped Claudia and Chuck off at the airport and went in search of the train station. That was when I fell victim to one of my bad habits – understanding something without remembering what language it's in. Once I'd explained to Roland, we retraced our steps and got even more lost. We stopped at a garage where we saw four mechanics playing cards.

Roland pointed. 'You go ask them. God knows what they speak.' It turned out to be mostly Luxembourgeois. They managed to understand my German and I figured out their directions. We got to the train station. Found the Left Luggage.

Fifteen minutes after the Left Luggage closed for the weekend. It was noon on Saturday.

'What am I going to do?' I wondered aloud. 'I'm flying to New York in an hour.' I got a shrug.

Yes, children, you could cut it that fine in 1975. Security checks were cursory at airports back then. Mind you, if you rode the S-Bahn in Berlin, as I had that summer, and they happened to be repairing any track under that divided city, you would have seen – as I did – armed guards with AK47s standing around the workmen.

I explained my baggage issue to the check-in clerk at the airport. She smiled. 'That's no problem,' she said. 'Give me the receipt. We'll have someone pick up the luggage on Monday and forward it to you in New York.'

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

I travelled light to New York City. The customs official raised one eyebrow. 'That's not a lot of luggage for a ten-month stay,' was his comment. I explained. He nodded and stamped my passport.

Three days later, as promised, the Suitcase, containing all my worldly goods, arrived at the airport in Elmira. (They'd got the plane off the runway.) I did my laundry and repacked for the journey to Pittsburgh. It was a chore getting it on and off three buses, but I made it back all right.

There's a moral in there somewhere. What was it? Oh, yeah: each choice is a fork in the road. You never know where it's going to take you. But hey, some of them work out and you make discoveries along the way.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

31.07.23 Front Page

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