Inside the train station hall twelve guys in big woven ponchos and flat black hats were playing Andean folk music on pipes and guitars. These South American guys had set up a card-reader on a post, but you didn’t have to pay them if you didn’t want to. You could just sit and listen to their free music. There were plenty of free beanbags around to lie in, and there was free water, and plenty of free biscuits, and a very nice free ladies’ room. As far as she could figure it, there was no reason why she couldn’t just spend the rest of her life right here in the good old Frankfurt train station.
It was warm and cozy, and just watching all the different European people wander past with their luggage was endlessly fascinating. She felt a bit conspicuous sitting there in her public beanbag publicly nibbling her public biscuits, but she wasn’t hurting anybody. In fact, everybody who looked at her obviously thought she was great. The Deutschland people smiled at her. Men especially smiled at her quite a lot. As she killed an hour, she saw ten or twelve little kids in the crowd. Even the little kids smiled at her.
Everybody thinking they had something important to do. How pathetically amusing. Why couldn’t they just sit still and enjoy life? What was their big hurry? All this aimless running around … They were all gonna live a million years—wasn’t that the point of everything? You could just lie still in a beanbag and be at peace with the universe, perfectly happy.
She enjoyed this thoroughly, for about an hour and a half. Then she became indifferent. Openly bored. Restless. Agitated, and finally unable to sit still a moment longer. Besides, the guys from the Andes had begun to repeat the same songs again, and that whistle thing they were blowing was really irritating. She got up and chose herself a train like everybody else was doing.
Inside the train it was noisy. With talk. The train itself didn’t make any noise at all, but the people aboard were chattering and eating noodles and drinking big malts. It was an extremely fast train and as silent as an eel. It ran on tracks but it didn’t touch them. She put her bag under the seat and wished that she could understand Deutsch.
When she picked her bag up, she found the neck of the bag yawning open, and realized that her hamster had escaped. The nasty little hairbug had finally made a break for it, either inside the train, or back at the Frankfurt station. At first she was a little upset, but then she realized how funny it was. Hamster on the loose! Mass panic grips Europe! Well, good-bye, good riddance, and good luck, postrodent! No hard feelings, okay?
She got off the train at Munchen because she liked the name of the city. Once it had been Munich or Muenchen or Moenchen or even München, but the All-European Orthographic Reformation had made it into Munchen. Munchen, Munchen, Munchen. Somebody had said that Stuttgart was the greatest city for the arts in the whole world, but Stuttgart wasn’t half so pretty a name as Munchen.
She knew she would love Munchen as soon as she discovered that they were giving away pretzels at the kiosks. Not little American dry stick pretzels with iodized salt either, but big warm bready pretzels that probably had traces of actual wheat and yeast in them. In the Munchen station there were about a hundred kids from all over Europe lined up laughing for these big bracelet-sized Munchen pretzels. The Bavarian civil-support bakery people had very smug looks about this situation. You could just tell they had some kind of ulterior motive.
She gleefully munched her two giant pretzels and drank more water and then she found another and even prettier girl, with long blond hair and a blue velvet coat, and followed her. And that was how she ended up in the Marienplatz.
There was a tubestation outlet in the platz, and a gushing fountain with a circular stone railing, and a big marble column with four bronze cherubs skewering devils. A gilded Virgin Mary stood at the column’s top, doing a kind of civil reconnaissance check. There was a telepresence site in one corner, and a bunch of fashion stores with glowing and moving mannequin displays. Lots of spindly Euro pedal-bikes parked around. There were all kinds of people wandering the Marienplatz. Tourists from all over the world. Especially Indonesians.
She leaned against the edge of the fountain railing, like the other kids in the platz. The fountain had three muscular bronze statues pouring eternal streams of water from big bronze buckets. The sun was setting already, and it was plenty cold. All the kids had flushed cheeks and windblown hair and they were in jackets and colored neck wrappings and odd-looking Euro-kid boots.
Every once in a while a pair of big German-shepherd police dogs would trot by the platz, and the kids would stop talking and tighten up a little.
The Marienplatz was a beautiful plaza. She liked the way the Muncheners had taken good care of their church: peaked arches, balconies, fishy-looking stone Christian saints transcending the flesh. She especially liked the colorful medieval wooden robots up in the clock tower.
Up on the tower’s steeple, dangling by their heels high above the platz, were three naked Catholics with their arms folded in prayer. They were doing a penitential performance ritual. Not calling any outrageous attention to themselves or anything, in fact it was pretty hard to notice the Catholics up there, dangling naked by the ridged teeth of the stone Gothic spire. They were exposing the flesh to the wind and the cold, very pious and dedicated, and obviously higher than kites.
Someone spoke to her, right at her elbow. She turned, looking away from the steeple penitents. “What?” she said.
And there stood a young good-looking guy in a sheepskin jacket and sheepskin pants—basically, in fact, the guy was wearing an entire sheep, included the tanned and eyeless head, which was part of his jacket lapel. He was white and woolly-curly all over. But he had black slicked-back hair, which went well with his rather slicked-back forehead and his sloping black eyebrows. “Ah, English,” he said. “No problem, I speak English.”
“You do? Good. Hi!”
“Hi. From where are you coming?”
“California.”
“Just come to Munchen today?”
“Ja.”
He smiled. “What’s your name?”
“Maya.”
“I’m Ulrich. Welcome to my beautiful city. So you’re all alone, no parents, no boyfriend? You are standing here in the Marienplatz two hours, you don’t meet anybody, you don’t do anything.” He laughed. “Are you lost?”
“I don’t have to go anywhere in particular, I’m just passing through.”
“You are lost.”
“Well,” Maya said, “maybe I am a little lost. But at least I haven’t been spying on other people for two whole hours, like you have.”
Ulrich smiled slowly, swung a big brown backpack off his shoulders, and set it at his feet. “How could I help but to watch such a beautiful woman?”
Maya felt her eyes widen. “You really think so? Oh, dear …”
“Yes, yes! I can’t be the first man to tell you this news! You’re lovely. You’re beautiful! You’re cute like a big rabbit.”
“I bet that sounds really nice in Deutsch, Ulrich, but …”
“I’m sure I can help you. Where’s your hotel?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Well, where’s your luggage, then?”
She lifted her handbag.
“No luggage. No hotel. No place to go. No parents, no boyfriend. You got any money?”
“No.”
“How about an ID? I hope you have your ID.”
“Especially no ID.”
“So. Then you are a runaway.” Ulrich thought this over, with evident glee. “Well, I have good news for you, Miss Maya the Runaway. You’re not the only runaway to come to Munchen.”