Hurenbrunnen

The castle is what they come for. Gorgeous, gleaming rosy-red in the late afternoon sunlight, appropriately ruined, it poses seductively on a ridge in the hills overlooking the old quarter of town. Like a woman in a red-lit window, it is spectacularly exposed, peering down as if out of the corner of its eyes at the greedy mobs of tourists on the cobblestone streets, thousands of souls ripe for saving, unaware as they sleepwalk into the shops and the tacky beer halls.

I used to like the castle, until I understood it.

Yulia was the one who had to sit in the front seat by the window. Mirko said I was too ugly for that, but Yulia, who had pretty, long blond hair, was made for the part. My job was to wait in the back of the camper, and when a customer showed up, Mirko would turn off the flashing red Christmas lights up front. Sometimes, if the police happened to be around that night, Mirko would drive around with me or Yulia and the customer in the back.

A lot of them were tourists, the customers. It was surprising how many of them found our camper on the other side of town from the old quarter. Their wives were so busy licking their lips over the narrow lanes and overflowing flowerboxes and quaint shops that they didn't seem to notice their men missing in the snapshots.

I thought they'd be so civilized, these fat tourists with their fat wallets. But they were the biggest pigs I'd ever met.

There's only so much I can take, I kept telling Yulia in the little room we had to share in Mirko's flat near the train station. She didn't seem to get what I meant. She didn't speak much German, and didn't seem to mind anything much at all.

My patience had started running out long before I started seeing him on the street. One night, when I thought I couldn't stand being in that camper anymore, I nearly bit one of the pigs' ears off when the guy hit me, and that was when Mirko kicked me out of the camper, for the last time, he swore.

So I was on my own, for the first time since I came to the West. I worried about the police finding me and sending me back. If that happened, my mother would try to get me to work again in the factory near our village. All the girls your age work there, she'd say, and they count themselves lucky to have jobs.

I figured that almost anything was better than waking up in the morning surrounded by gray walls, gray people, gray air. At least when I'm surrounded by colors they distract me, lulling me into thinking it's all worth something, the immense, immaculate houses, the shiny cars. Even if the women would spit on me if they could, and the men--well, the men pretty much do that already.

There was always a cluster of well-dressed young men by the statue in the middle of Bismarck Square, approaching people as they walked by and handing out leaflets. I passed them every day, but went out of my way to avoid them, ducking behind the slow-moving tourists as they shuffled down the main street in herds. I didn't know who the young men were or what they wanted, and I didn't care.

I must have passed him there fifty times before I really noticed him. It was the morning after I had been kicked out of the camper. I was going down a back street, in a fog of exhaustion after walking most of the night, when someone suddenly leaped out in front of me. I saw a flash of white teeth.

"Is it not a beautiful day?" Funny accent, I thought. He hasn't been speaking German very long. I glared as I tried to scuttle around him. He blocked my path.

"Excuse me, please, do you have a minute to talk?"

"No, I don't have a minute to talk," I growled, but found myself standing still. The teeth were so white, so straight. I was staring.

"I would like to ask you a question." The mouth kept grinning, undaunted.

"So go ahead." Looking up from the teeth, I saw a smooth face and a pair of long-lashed green eyes so pretty they could have been a girl's. I wanted to blink, but couldn't.

"Have you thought about the next life?"

"The what?" I snapped out of my stare.

"The next life. Where you will be, what you will be when you are no longer on this earth."

"No, I haven't thought about the next life." I laughed nervously and went to move around him. He wouldn't let me go.

"Maybe I can help you think about it?" he offered. "It is such a beautiful, important thing, and you should be prepared."

"I'll remember that," I said with a weak smirk. "But maybe another time."

"Yes, yes, next time. I'll see you again. I've seen you before." He kept smiling and took my hand to shake it. "Goodbye--what is your name?"

"Zuzana."

"Goodbye, Zuzana. Until the next time." He took a few steps backward up the slight slope of the street, still beaming, and I turned to follow him with my eyes. He bounced around the corner like a happy sheepdog. I was holding a glossy brochure in my hand.

After that, I started going by Bismarck Square a couple times a day. I had to find those gentle green eyes again. I wasn't sure what exactly it was they were trying to tell me, but I knew I could trust them. I wanted to know where he had seen me before. He had noticed me, he said. I hid behind the moving masses on the main street, peeking over their shoulders to see if he was there. The foreign young men must have worked in shifts because I didn't see him very often at first. Soon I learned when he was there in the mornings. I liked watching him move, the way he could bring anyone walking by to a halt with his disarming smile and friendly voice. He always left the square with the same companion, another more serious looking young man.

I followed him and his friend one day when they left together. They handed out a lot of leaflets as they went along. Some people were rude to them, throwing the leaflets on the ground or making angry comments, but he never stopped smiling. They walked a long way to a dingy part of town where they went into a drab, old building. I waited at a distance, but they didn't come out again. When it got dark, I sat on the curb across the wide street. As I watched, other groups and pairs of young men started filing into the house, speaking in English, I thought, and laughing. None of them walked alone. I stayed where I was, reluctant to leave, until it was very late. It wasn't as if I had anywhere else to go.

I was about to drop off to sleep on the curb, concealed between parked cars, when the front door of the dark building opened, and his slender shadow slipped out onto the deserted sidewalk. I jumped up and followed him all the way back into the old part of town, but lost him there in the black web of alleys and lanes. He seemed to know his way around better than I did.

One evening, I was turning the corner of a narrow side street when a familiar lanky shape bounded up next to me.

"Hello, Zuzana! Good evening."

I jumped, less from fear than from some other nameless electric jolt.

"Where are you going?" He beamed at me as if I were an old friend.

"I was just going down to the river," I stammered. I think I was blushing.

"Would you mind if I came along?" I didn't answer, but he didn't seem to notice. We fell into step together, and I peered at him slyly as we walked. I wanted to ask where he went the night I followed him. He smiled constantly to himself as if he were lost in a memory too good for words. His short hair was neatly combed, and he wore a black nametag on his spotless white shirt. Ben.

"Do you like the river?" he asked when we had reached the bank.

"Yes, very much. Don't you?"

"Oh, it is very beautiful."

He was right, it was very beautiful, and we just looked at it in silence for a while as we sat on the stone wall.

Once, in the early spring, I had seen the river rise so high that it overflowed the bank and the wall and the road, and had finally spilled over into the town itself. The front doors of the ancient houses closest to the river were wide open, and torrents of muddy water were pouring from them into the street. Inside, they must have been completely ruined, flooded from the cellar up. At the corner where I stopped to watch the flood, an old woman stood knee-deep in the cold brown water, her arms clasped rigidly around her waist as she watched the water rush down the front steps of what must have been her house, the last one of the row. She looked lost, displaced from her own home, and was unable to get out of the rain. She was shivering. Quietly, politely, I asked if I could buy her a cup of tea. Her head whipped around toward my voice. She looked me up and down. Her mouth tightened, she gave a little sniff with a toss of her head, holding my eyes with her violent glare, and sloshed back to stand closer to her house.

My accent. I felt as if my feet had grown into the street, and I watched the gushing water as numbly as one of the statues lining the old bridge.

Now the houses were dry and impenetrable again.

I felt comfortable with my new friend Ben. "You're a kind person," I said.

"Every person is truly kind at heart," he said. "You're also a very kind woman. You have a good heart."

"You can see that?"

"Oh, of course I can see that. I think everyone can see that," Ben assured me.

I peered at him through squinted eyes. "How?"

He just smiled placidly for a while before answering.

"You've been through a lot of pain. I see that in your eyes, your pain. And I don't think you come down here only to look at the water. Do you?" Now his eyes narrowed slightly.

"No, I don't," I whispered.

"Where do you sleep?" he asked in a low voice. The smile was gone. I pointed up the river with my chin, in the direction of the old bridge. He cast his eyes down and nodded wisely as if he had known my secret all along, as if he could see right inside me.

"There is a better way, you know. It's not too late for you. I can help," he said gravely. "Did you read what I gave you?"

I nodded, lying. I had lost the brochure that same night when the police suddenly cleared out the place where I had been sleeping. If I hadn't bolted when they showed up, they would have caught me.

"That's good, very good. Next time we'll talk some more," he said as he stood up from the wall and took my hand again. This time there was no brochure. "I have to get back to my group, but I'll be thinking of you."

"Ben," I said, hoping to get him to stay another moment. "I'd like to show you something next time. Will you come with me?"

"Of course, Zuzana, anything for you." He smiled brightly at me again. I turned away from the river to watch him go. As he disappeared around a corner, the maddening red of the castle in the setting sunlight caught my eye. The outer wall of the massive fortress, suspended above the roofs of the town, was just visible, taunting me with its opulent permanence.

I hoped I would see Ben the next day, but I couldn't find him anywhere. I didn't see him enter or leave his building that night either. The following morning, I went looking for him again at the statue in Bismarck Square. He was there, and I approached him directly, trying to match his confident smile with my own.

"Zuzana! Good morning."

"Ben." My throat was so constricted I thought I might choke. "Do you have time today to take a walk?"

"Sure," he drew me aside, away from the small cluster of clean young men in earnest discussions with people holding shopping bags. The one I recognized as his group partner intently observed us. Ben lowered his voice. "I'll be finished here in about two hours. We'll go then." He started to turn back to the group, but came back. "But don't come here looking for me. We'll meet by the river. Okay?"

I could only nod and return his encouraging smile as I moved off. He smelled so clean. His shirt must have just been washed and ironed. I liked how I had to look up at him just slightly when we were facing each other.

I'm not sure why I needed to bring him up there. It was my escape, my aerie, I liked to call it to myself. I had discovered the place on one of my walks in the woods, on a path far beyond the castle overlooking the river. I had tried to tell Yulia about it once when we were wasting a day in our tiny room, waiting for Mirko to pick us up, but she didn't know the word aerie. I had laughed when I told her what the place's real name was according to the map, but I don't think she got that either.

As I led Ben up the steep path, we didn't speak. The town was surrounded by hills crisscrossed with paths. You could get lost in those woods and not see another soul for hours, maybe even days. There was no road nearby, so no tourists ever made it up there. I only knew some of the paths behind the castle, and often walked there, spending whole days alone.

Sometimes I pretended I was a young noblewoman, out for her daily stroll, carefully attended by her retinue of maidservants. My step fell elegantly upon the gravel, and I swooped gracefully around the bigger rocks, delicately holding up my rich brocade skirts so they wouldn't brush the ground. I would never tell Ben about that, but I wanted to show him the place anyway.

Cresting the top of the hill, we came upon an impressive pile of red sandstone, the remains of a small ancient building. Off to the side, partially obscured by the trees from where we stood, was a large stone trough from which came the steady trickle of water. I never tried to learn what the building had once been--that would have broken the spell of the place, to know.

"Over here." I led Ben through the trees to my secret fountain. "It's a spring," I explained. Below us, the old town was spread out like a red-tile quilt. You couldn't see the snaking lines of tourists clogging the streets from up there. It all looked peaceful, perfect. As always, I plunged my arms into the deep water in the trough, enjoying the sting of the cold on my skin. I washed my arms, my face, my neck, and felt clean.

"It's good water, you can drink it," I offered to Ben as I cupped a handful and sipped.

"Zuzana," he began, ignoring my suggestion and sitting on the edge of the trough. "We started talking yesterday. Have you thought about changing your life? About what you will become after you leave here?"

"Yes, I think about it all the time," I confessed.

"Would you like to learn more? Would you like to learn how to make those changes?" he took my hand, which still stung from the cold water.

"Yes," I whispered. I wanted to fall onto his shoulder and wake up somewhere else. As exhaustion welled up inside me, my body was suddenly heavier than the pile of old stones.

"I have to go home soon, my time here is nearly finished. There is a place for you there, and good people who can help you make the journey. Would you like to make that journey?" He was holding both of my hands. I nodded shyly like a little girl who knows she's done something wrong and should be punished, but also knows that the kindly adult scolding her has taken pity on her and will be gentle.

"Will you take me?" I managed to squeak before the tears started falling.

"Of course, Zuzana, of course." He brushed the hair out of my face. "I'll show you the path." I gave him a crushing hug. He laughed and, prying himself from my grasp, apologized for having to get back to his group. They didn't know he'd left early, he explained, and he didn't want them to know he'd been gone so long.

"When will we go?" I asked as he headed for the trail back down.

"I'll let you know, don't worry." He grinned and disappeared over the top of the hill.

I washed my face and sat on the rocky ground, leaning my back against the damp stone of the trough. I wondered where Ben was really from and what his family would be like. Would his parents like me? Would we have our own big house? Would I have my own car? Would I have a real job, maybe wear an official nametag like Ben, and sit at a desk in an important office? I would have to learn English, wouldn't I? And wouldn't I need a passport? Ben would know. Relieved, and a little surprised at my luck, I couldn't help sighing. My escape was soon to be real.

Waiting for Ben's signal, I often passed Bismarck Square at a discreet distance, not wanting to attract too much attention to myself and get him in trouble with his group. They seemed strict, and I wanted to fit in. I didn't know if they knew about Ben and me. Sometimes, when he saw me go by, he'd give me a small wave and a secret smile. Once, when he wasn't so busy, he brought me over to the other young men and introduced me, telling them that I was soon going to be making the journey. They all seemed very pleased at the news.

"Welcome, sister," one of them said as he warmly clasped my hand. "The path to eternal life is not an easy one. But your good brothers and sisters will help you along."

Confused, I looked at Ben for a hint at how I should respond. He just nodded, smiling. I guessed it was not the right time to ask about when we would be leaving together.

After a few more days, when I could no longer stand the waiting, I passed him a note as I went by. He seemed surprised, and I hoped I wasn't risking too much, too early. I didn't want to compromise his plan for us.

Dear Ben,

Meet me at the spring today when you can. I'll be waiting all day for you, so it doesn't matter when you come. I can't wait to talk about our future. I have so many questions. I am already a new woman because of you. Thank you.

Your Zuzana

I rushed to the spring, thinking that, having torn open my note immediately, Ben might be right behind me on the trail. I readied myself for him to come, tried to look composed, and sat on the pile of sandstone blocks by the head of the path so I could watch him come up the hill. As I looked out over the roofs of the town and at the hills on the other side of the murky river, I felt so light, so high on hope that I might flutter and fly off.

It's funny how colors can burn themselves into one's eyes so that it still seems alive and real long after something has disappeared. I remember the castle on that day, grotesquely red and gorgeous. From where I sat by the spring, its toppled tower was on the other side, so that it almost looked whole. As the day wore on, it gradually faded from a deep wine red to a repulsive, cold, greenish brown, until it finally turned gray.

When I went back to the statue in the square the next morning, Ben wasn't there. I recognized a couple of the other young men handing out reading material and approached them. Ben was gone, they said. No, they didn't know where he was, but they wouldn't be seeing him again.

Now I can't believe I was ever so impressed by an old building. They still flock there to see it, I know they must. I can just picture them, scrambling out of their buses and squeezing themselves up the narrow cobblestone passageway so they can join the next tour: this way to the world's largest wine barrel, that way to the stunning scenic view, straight ahead to the souvenir shop. One day, though, even that castle's luck will run out. It will collapse entirely and, in the end, become nothing but another pile of useless, broken stones marking a forgotten place.

Back here, where I started, ancient decrepitude is everywhere, and no one pays any money to see it. Under its desolate blanket of gray, this place, my place, was already forgotten long ago.