It was more that twenty years ago, and I still have an image of this particular woman, short, dark, with black eyes, a black skirt, a white top, carrying a tray out to me. I’d always imagined Bavarians as tall and blond.
I was on my way to Sicily, to Sciacca, where my father had been born to meet my uncle, my father’s oldest brother, Francisco, a man in his eighties, to deliver a document assigning my father’s interests in the family properties over to him.
Traveling on a Eurail Pass, I had already spent a week cruising around on the train. Cruising on the train through Germany by day had been a panorama of softly rolling hills, like waves, and tracks of healthy, rounded, well formed trees, the yellow and green expanses of the fields set against the tracts of trees of varying heights and varying greens, a painter’s countryside, of many greens, from the bluest in the trees to the yellow of the cropped fields of corn in September.
I had a first class ticket. The distinct difference between first and second class, it seemed to me, was insulation. After a night on the train, sitting up in the dark, on my way to sunny Sicily, I’d gotten off the train in Heidelberg, took a break from the journey. The day before, I’d missed the train to Zurich, and wound up in Paris. The next evening I’d headed south.
I was going to find some aspirin and maybe some dental floss. At the train station, I remember ordering “kaffe” and maybe a roll and jam. I paid for my purchase at a counter and sat down at a round table, outside, some distance from the tracks, and wrote post cards.
Landing in Amsterdam the week before, I had left my jacket on a tram. I went to a department store and bought a jacket, a pair of pants, and a pair of sunglasses, so I looked like I fit in: Fewer hastles if you don’t look like a tourist, I figured.
The woman who brought my order said to me: “You’re all coming back!”
I asked her: “What do you mean, you’re all coming back?”
“You jews, ” she said. ” I can smell them.”
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