Bare Neck, Broken Glass
There are certain moments that you remember even years later with a terrible clarity, reliving every second of what happened as if it were happening again around you. The details are like needles poking your mind and sharpening your memory. You remember the slant of the sunlight that fell on his forehead. You remember the words of the song she was singing. You remember the sound of the wind rushing outside. You remember the sound of breaking glass. And you even remember in excruciating detail the moment that seemed to last forever as it hung before your eyes like a question for which no one had an answer.
We were traveling for the weekend. We were on our way to Freiburg. From there our plan was to head on into the Black Forest. It was winter, just after Christmas. We planned to go where the snow would be thick. I wanted to be surrounded by a blinding whiteness to wipe everything from my mind while my friends wanted to ski. It was a perfect arrangement. I could wander the whole day through the forest and photograph the snow covered landscape and trees to my heart’s content while my friends would practice their skiing skills on the slopes of Seebuck. We would be staying in a quaint little hostel in the nearby village of Feldberg.
The friends I was traveling with were German. I had met them both while couch surfing through Hamburg back in November. Frederica was 31 years old and was just starting out as an architect. Her boyfriend Klaus worked as a consultant for the state environment ministry. He was 30 years old. Unlike the popular stereotype of Germans they were anything but reserved. We had connected instantly and my stay in Hamburg was a particularly memorable one. We ate, drank and talked late into the night about everything in the world. It was during one of those endless conversations when time seems to fly by so fast that the idea to travel together was conceived. They were not big on Christmas and I as usual would be on my own doing nothing. Since they were big ski enthusiasts and I wanted to be surrounded by snow we decided to travel to the south of Germany. We arranged to meet in Frankfurt as it was a convenient place for them to pick me up as they drove down south. The day I met them again in Frankfurt was one of those rare winter days with a very bright sun, although the sun did nothing to dispel the cold. But we were warm in the car and the conversation flowed again on the long drive as if it had never stopped.
The meandering conversations helped me forget the many issues I was dealing with. It was a particularly trying time for me on the personal front. I had recently gotten out of a relationship that was going nowhere but the whole break up had turned very bitter. They were problems on the home front too. My sister had fallen in love with a Muslim boy and my conservative parents were not happy about it at all. So twice a day I had to listen to my parents rant about how my sister had shamed them in front of society. As a result of all these happenings my work got affected and I had already been subjected to two performance reviews. On more such review, I was politely but firmly told, I’d be on my way out. Naturally, I felt like running away to some far off place, away from all the seemingly silly troubles that I was unable to deal with. The trip, the warmth of my friends and the solitude of snow would give me some time to recover and recharge I thought.
I also sensed that Klaus and Frederica were having some problems of their own on the relationship front. Although they never talked about their troubles and seemed to be perfectly happy they would frequently start arguing for no reason. The arguments, on the surface, were about superficial things but I could sense that something deeper lay behind them. From the little hints that Frederica dropped from time to time I guessed that it had something to do with the question of starting a family. It seemed as if Klaus was against the idea for economic reasons while Frederica like many women of her age thought that biological time was running out for her.
But in that car our conversations cut through our troubled thoughts. We enjoyed the changing landscape around us as we passed into the scenic state of Baden-Württemberg. The sky peppered us with a light snow from time to time which immediately froze as soon as it touched the cold ground. We caught up on gossip about film stars we did not like. We argued about the US foreign policy. Frederica and I debated whether Calatrava was better than Foster. Klaus criticized our skepticism about climate change. Later, Frederica and I started singing Klaus’s favorite songs intentionally off key to irritate him. To make us stop he tried to scare us by attempting to drive erratically on the slightly slippery road. It was during that moment that it happened.
