Ursel

by Raquel Borges (Portugal)

Making a local connection Germany

“Brandenburg!? Es gibt nichts da!” My German teacher was utterly surprised. “There is nothing in Brandenburg, absolutely nothing! The whole region is a joke in Germany!” We had just listened to a song describing the area as an Emptiness, with perhaps only a few hills with sad Nazis eager to beat someone up but with no one whom to do that. The teacher considered it funny, “Because it’s true,” he said. I had been there, as a matter of fact, a few months earlier, in March. I had thought it would be nice to volunteer in this artistic organization, plenty of activities in which to take part in, thus I applied to stay for two months in that small village, Lunow was the name. I realized the mistake soon after. Three days later I was dying of desperation. The area was a black hole. Nothing to see or to do or to live for. It was as empty as can be. A person could walk for hours from village to village without finding another human soul. Or any soul of any kind. There were scarcely trees. The sound of the wind was the only thing that arrived in one’s ears, if it was windy. It was NOT the kind of nothingness that finds you calmly breathing the fresh summer breeze in the fields. It was the kind that creeps into your being and makes you frightened. I had made up my mind. I would leave as soon as possible. Justus could brilliantly play the piano; he had taught himself how to do it. There was a small wooden piano in the warm living room and Léo, the orange cat, kept climbing onto it. The building was an oasis of colour, music and cosiness. As the only volunteers, with nothing to do whatsoever, Justus and I spent our time exploring the region. “There’s a lot do here!” said Steph once, “You can bike till you reach the border, for instance. The river Oder is nice. And you can see Poland." So, for instance, we biked till we reached the border. The Oder was a large grey mirror of the sky, and on the other side of it, land we kept staring at. “That’s Poland, huh?” I said. “Yup. Poland.” We kept staring. “Nice. I have never been to Poland.” “Well, you’ve seen it now.” There was no bridge, of course. We cycled back. Ursel arrived on that day. She was sixty and had crazy curly blonde hair, rounded glasses and a sense of wonder with the world one rarely sees in the most exciting of places. She was sad that I would leave, as if she had failed to show me how fascinating this place could be, sad that I couldn’t see it. But I got stubborn about leaving. As last resource, she took us biking to Stolpe. We should sleep in the abandoned offices of an old concrete factory by the canal. The rooms still smelled like an office. They smelled like paper and ink and dusty brown carpets and resignation. The long-term plan was to transform the boring rooms into something as good and bright as the building back in Lunow. That was clearly a tough challenge, but something that brought purpose to being there, something Ursel saw as to be exciting and promising. She didn’t see boredom anywhere. She saw only the future in things when some action was taken. That evening, in the improvised kitchen, Ursel prepared one of her favourite meals, chickpea curry. During dinner, she told us about the fall of the Berlin Wall. She was living in the West side by then, and started seeing people from the East walking around, what looked like a temporal glitch. They wore outdated clothes and just seemed startled by everything. Justus took the guitar and started playing; he had taught himself the guitar, too, and we all sang along Tom Waits’ lyrics. We spent the next day ripping wallpaper to Ursel’s R&B playlist. I truly enjoyed it. Finally, the day over, as we cycled back to Lunow along the Oder with the wind in our ears, I couldn’t help but thinking, “What if there’s more to Brandenburg?”