(This article was first drafter last Tuesday, 1 November and could not be published due to internet problems, a common issue in North-Rhine Westphalia; so when it says "tonight," that's when it is referring to. As Today I publish it, nearly a week later, I have returned to Texas)
Tonight is a colder, windier night than the few before it. I have to laugh, stepping out my door and zipping up my leather jacket, at that fact. "Wind," I just got through teaching my online Western Lit class a week ago, "is almost always a symbol for change when it appears in a novel, and this is true in both Western and Chinese novels. And if a character is cold, it is usually a symbol that they are alone." Dismissing the thought, I set my phone to Springsteen's "I'm on Fire," push repeat one, and start walking.
A quick stroll down the driveway, lit by the motion sensor light, and then a left turn at the street, faces me toward the village church whose damnable everlasting bells have been such a source of irritation for me these three months. Another fifty meters or so and then a quick right then left puts me on a one-lane hill-country road called Am Muhlenhang. The streetlights end here, and about another 300 meters onward the way gets dark enough that I really don't feel like venturing out of the streetlights this late at night, especially not this close to the woods. German fairy tales are full of wolves for a reason. Another thirty meters or so takes me past the only house on the right side of the street and it's here where I stop, gazing out from my near-hilltop perch over the jet-black horizon. East, I think to myself. That way is East. Which means that out there, across that horizon, is most of Germany (the Belgian border is behind me less than a km away). Beyond that, Poland. And beyond that (I sigh as I think of it), the vast and now-wartorn expanse of Ukraine, the country I came to call home.
Across that expanse in a straight line, nearly on its farthest side, is the city of Kharkiv, where I lived; where a year ago this month I hired my first two teachers because my school was finally getting too big for one man to handle alone. Back when life was good. Back when the biggest worry I had was convincing my barely-eighteen-year-old girlfriend "yes honey, I DO have to go home before 5 AM so I can wake up at 7:45 to be on-camera for my 8 AM classes, which means once this karaoke bar closes I really do have to take you home. No, it means we can't go some place else and keep partying until 7 AM when McDonalds opens up and then go hang out more." A smirk twists the corners of my mouth as I think on it, which fades almost immediately as I recall that those days are not all that's gone. Indeed Kharkiv, the city where those memories were made, lies in ruins. The sobering thought brings a sigh as I pull the collar of my jacket tighter and look back out over the Eastern horizon.
And beyond that, the country that took it from me: Russia.
As if cued by the thought, a gust of wind sweeps up a mass of crisp fallen leaves, cold from lying exposed all day, and blows them mockingly around my face. The Eastern horizon offers no reply except the slow, eternal dimming-and-brightening of a sea of synchronized red lights: windmills, rising above the low-sloping hills like H. G. Wells's Martian fighting machines.
There's something absurdly surreal about the moment. The town, an ocean away from home, looks and feels so much like Natchitoches, Louisiana, that if it weren't for the cold wind I'd swear I had fallen into one of Mario's warp pipes and portalled back to the US's Bible Belt. The view, with red-lit windmills towering over pastureland, with no sound except the occasional lowing of cattle or the so-distant cry of an engine alone on a late-night road, is so ludicrously like the Western Horizon of the last night I was in Texas, back in 2021 with a one-way ticket to Ukraine in my hand and a head full of dreams, that is seems almost a parody.
For me to be sitting here, in Germany (the last country I ever intended to set foot in), gazing Eastward toward Ukraine, so near the eve of my final flight Westward, and to find myself unable to distinguish, visually, between the memory of then and the reality of now, is something so cruelly poetic that it belongs in a Dickens novel or a Dylan song.
Don't get it twisted. I'm not going to miss this country, least of all this Christ-forsaken little village. Maybe I do wish I had gotten around and done a little more sightseeing, instead of lying in bed at this miserable shelter and feeling depressed. There's a castle near her, Bruhl, that isn't hard to get to. There's the city of Cologne which I have barely seen except for a bar called "The Corkonian" and, of course, the damnable train station (my first stop going from Hellenthal to anywhere that matters). There's the Siegfried line, which I've gotten a grand total of one photo of because I passed by it every day wondering what those weird little concrete blocks were, blissfully unaware of their nature until three days ago. And I'm not going to see any of it again.
But considering what a nightmare my time here has been, there's no reason I should feel any nostalgia about this place. And yet for some inexplicable reason, I am overcome with it. I think... I think I am beginning to understand why prison inmates start feeling nostalgic about their prison on the eve of their parole.
And as the thought comes to mind, my memory goes back to the usual crowd at "Crazy Panda" Karaoke in Kharkiv, singing "Vladimirskiy Central" at top drunken volume. The thought brings that same smirk-for-a-moment-then-sigh response as the other memories of Kharkiv, for the same reason. As long as I was in Europe, there was some ghost of a hope that eventually, somehow, I'd be going back to that life I had in Kharkiv, or at least back to put together the pieces that were left of it.
But more to the point, it's just... as if there is a sense that reality itself is somehow mocking me, as I find myself in the exact same setting on the eve of my final departure from Germany before three days in Rotterdam and then a plane back to the States (seemingly for good), as I was on my final night before leaving them (intending to be for good). I suppose Stephen King's Gunslinger, Roland Deschain, had it right. Ka truly is a wheel.
And with that thought, I adjust my jacket, give one last, long, sighing, sweeping gaze out over the Eastern horizon, and head back to my room at Rathaus for one last night. Because if Roland was right about Ka being a wheel, he would also be the first to recognize when the world is moving on.
Maybe it's time for this Gunslinger to move on with it.
1 Mar, 2021 - 5 Nov, 2022: It Was a Hell of a Ride.