MY KAFKAESQUE, MAGIC FLIGHT HOME
I was driven by Oliver, my landlord to the Celle train station at 6 in the morning and got there in plenty of time. By bus I would have had only three to seven minutes to get on the train. I was lucky I had plenty of time because the electronic train ticket on my iPhone said that I had to get to track #4 and the train actually left from track #6. It took me a number of minutes to realize I was in the wrong plane, and running from the bus I wouldn’t have figured it out in time and faced a 100 euro taxi ride to Hannover.
The first smooth, silent, rapid train led to a second slower train from Langenhagenmitte to the Hannover Airport that was unmarked and which I almost missed. But then I was in the airport eager to find Lufthansa checkin desk. The airport appeared to be completely empty with a huge, domed brilliantly lit room with many empty gates all the way around but no passengers or anyone else in sight. I and an Indian from Patna, who was also searching for somewhere to checkin, finally found the desk down a hallway.
The weight of my baggage, 12 kilos, was all right but I worried about my negative Covid test being accepted and wondered if not having filled out the required attestation form, required for entrance to the USA by the CDC, which I couldn’t get printed the night before, would get me into trouble. (I later learned that a man whose Covid 19 negative form wasn’t accepted in Charlotte on the way over was forced to take a taxi back into Charlotte where he got a $200 acceptable Covid 19 test but was forced to take a later plane, so it could happen).
Sure enough, the woman who checked me in was first going to reject me for having a test that clearly said self test. There seemed little likelihood at 7 a.m. that in the empty airport I was going to get another test. The form I had mentioned self test along with a German description of the test, but I had been tested in an official testing station. I finally convinced her, enough, that I was a clueless foreigner who had gone to an official testing station and couldn’t read the German of the test form but had been promised that it was ok. She reluctantly said that I would have to get the form checked in Munich and that they would perhaps accept it or I could be tested again there.
In the huge bustling Munich airport I didn’t wander around as I normally would. I was still worried that I might be rejected or delayed by either the missing attestation form or the negative test form.
The anxiety was all within me. I had the feeling of being in a Kafkaesque world in which I was being tripped up bureaucratic rules and accusations of guilt while having no idea what the rules were.
Trying to fly from an empty airport, not signing an attestation form which made no sense (I had read the five page form on line which covered every possible way of being tested and every possible exception to the CDC rules after which I had to promise that in my case I had been properly vaccinated and tested, again when not knowing what was proper. The promises I thought I was being asked to make, that I would self isolate for seven days after returning and would get an additional Covid 19 test within five days, without my knowing what was a proper test, was simply a promise. No one in Asheville, I knew, would enforce the promise. It was an empty promise that I was quite happy to make.
But finally I began to have the realization that I was in a kafkaesque world with no nameless figure in charge, no one knew the rules. First of all it turned out that once the checkin lady half accepted my Covid test no one in Munich was interested in even glancing at my Covid test forms again. And the attestation form which I hadn’t been able to print, that I thought would cause some bureaucratic delay, didn’t exist in Munich in the lines I went through or at the gate. People who originated their flight in Munich had the form and signed it but were never asked for it. I thought I might be able to get the form in Charlotte, but no one was interested in it there, either. All the Charlotte people looked at were my passport and my customs declaration, which they barely glanced at. They weren’t interested in screening for Covid at all.
All the way through I had this nagging feeling that I was going to be busted by some bureaucrat when I turned out that the bureaucrats seemed to be as clueless as me with faith in a system, how well I was checked in Hannover, that extended all the way to the United States, once checked I was done. I could even carry bottles of water (and anything else I wanted to) from one flight to the other, through a Byzantine path of escalators and elevators zooming up and down and an underground train ride to the next terminal. Once checked I was checked. Kafkaesque.
But there was another feeling that I had which I have had before. This feeling was a feeling of how amazing and how easy it was to step into a plane in Hannover and out in München, then in in München and out in Charlotte, all in one day. You step into and strap yourself into a matchine which makes all kinds of muffled roaring sounds while images of clouds float by the window and then after a while you step out in a completely different place. This trip across the Atlantic with no sensation of movement except for the travel information on the screen in front of me took ten days on the SS. Atlantis, as a boy. In that case the boat pitched and wallowed between towering waves and the location pin on the map of the Atlantic moved about an inch a day. I had the feeling of a endless boat trip. Travel meant movement over time from one place to another. But with the plane I stepped in, sat for a while as it roared, stepped out and I was half a world away. It was magic. How could I have been in Winsen yesterday morning on the way to the airport and one day later be looking out of my window in Swannanoa at the same hour at a pink and orange sunrise. And though ten hours in a narrow seat is tiring and mind numbing, on the other hand, how easy it was to do. You step in and you step out and you are in München or Paris or Paros or Morocco, how easy and how much fun. Maybe it is the Kafkaesque part that keeps people from doing it, the unknown.
So that was my day yesterday. Kafkaesque on one hand and sudden magic on the other. And here I am in Swannanoa.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 