Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp

Author:Katja Oskamp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peirene Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

WORK OUTING

The last day of November, a cold, drizzly Friday. Months ago Tiffy, Flocke and I marked it off and kept it free. The salon’s closed, no clients today. We’ve bought a group train ticket and we’ll be departing from the Ostbahnhof at 8.34. I can walk to the Ostbahnhof in twenty minutes; Tiffy and Flocke are coming from Marzahn S-Bahn station.

When I reach the concourse, I spot Tiffy standing in front of one of the cafés, rucksack by her side, shoulders hunched, hands buried in her pockets. A little cropped red coat, black harem pants, flat shoes.

‘Where’s Flocke?’ I ask.

‘Overslept,’ says Tiffy.

We buy coffee and croissants and wander up to Platform One. We stand there munching and sipping. Tiffy’s annoyed with Flocke. Flocke is often late, even to work.

‘What’s going on with Flocke?’ she asks.

‘She’s getting old,’ I say.

Tiffy looks at me as if it’s the most stupid excuse she’s ever heard. She looks down, happier to be talking to a station pigeon picking at our croissant crumbs, which raises her spirits. Tiffy is crazy about animals, about almost any animal, and when she shifts her attention to an animal, it always seems a little as though she’s escaping from people. Having said that, it has to be animals with no more than four legs, as Tiffy regularly points out. She has a genuine spider phobia.

Flocke, on two legs, comes puffing up the stairs and rolls her eyes: she only woke up at ten to seven and shot out of bed, flung open the doors as if she were possessed, stuffed her clothes into her rucksack and didn’t even manage to do her hair. So that’s why she’s wearing that dark blue hat with the rhinestones and the big bobble.

The local train arrives and we trundle off to Fürstenwalde, where we need to change trains after a half-hour wait. We go over the footbridge to reach the other platform. Stairs are Flocke’s idea of hell, especially going up. She struggles up them, with one hand on the banister. I can’t imagine what kind of painkillers Flocke has to knock back to get through days like these.

I need to go to the loo and so does Tiffy. There isn’t one here. Flocke waits on the platform, while Tiffy and I go back up the stairs, back down the other side, look for a WC sign, ask in the station hall and then head off to the bakery café opposite, where there’s a queue for the loo. They’re charging everyone forty cents, as they have a monopoly on loos here. The key to the loo, which is passed from one person to the next in silence, has a nutmeg grater hanging from it, for some obscure reason. With everything so thin on the ground in Fürstenwalde – the number of loos, the train times, cultural offerings, population density – not even a dog would want to be buried here.

The little Niederbarnim train arrives promptly and takes just twelve minutes to reach Bad Saarow.

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