Unplanned Parenthood

July 26, 2006

In the mood for a riotous lark, I decided to take a trip to Berlin with my friend Kristin. We travelled using a Deutsche Bahn special offer – the “Happy Weekend” ticket, which, according to the company, “offers all sorts of ways in which you can save money. Even at night, in your sleep.”

Ha, ha! Good one, Deutsche Bahn! The idea that night could have anything to do with sleep for a discount traveller on German rail is a merry jape indeed, and one which slyly draws attention away from the real purpose of “Happy Weekend”: namely, to thoroughly punish poor people for not having more money. The low-price journey from Switzerland to Berlin was scheduled to be a mere 26 hours, with 11 separate trains and one night spent in a railway station. However, because only a witless indigent would actually consider it possible to make almost a dozen razor-tight connections without a single train being delayed, our trip actually took some 37 hours, with 15 transfers and a bonus night spent lying awake on the garbage-strewn platform in Chemnitz (née Karl Marx Stadt), fantasizing about our savings and our upcoming 4:15am train departure.

I could go on about my disappointment that the Germans had dropped the ball on the one thing their kultur is supposed to have mastered: efficient trains that run on time. But I’ll leave that for someone else to pick up – God knows they already have enough to apologize for. Instead, I’d like to relate an incident that happened during our first train station bivouac, when our starry-eyed reverence for the “Happy Weekend” ticket was still whole and untarnished.

Kristin and I had just staked out some fairly comfortable benches in the Basel train station and were getting ready to go to bed (saving handfuls of cash all the while, don’t forget!), when we were approached by a woman and a small girl who seemed to be preparing to do the same thing. The mother immediately began speaking to us in rapid German. She and her daughter were from Poland, she explained, seemingly very eager to show off her command of her adopted language.

We were duly impressed, but only in the kind of abstract way that a tone deaf person might admire a symphony. For, with the exception of her statement of nationality, the guttural waves of German washed over Kristin and me without triggering any glimmer of understanding. When there were gaps in the monologue, we responded with various non-verbal signs of incomprehension until I finally remembered the German words for “I don’t know” and began chanting them repeatedly like a charm against evil.

This evidently made a very favourable impression on the mother, because the next thing we knew we were the acting guardians of her child while she scampered out the door into the Basel night. Keep in mind that, up to this point, the only things she knew about us were: A) that we were loitering around a train station after hours, and B) that we had failed to understand a word she said. Apparently this was all the proof she needed that we’d be great surrogate parents.

An awkward situation ensued. Should one of us stay awake until the mother got back (assuming that was her plan)? Should we try to find out where she went? Should we start putting money away now for summer camp and college? All this thinking about doing the right thing was tiring work, however, and pretty soon we had both fallen into carefree, money-saving sleep.

I woke up a few hours later, to the sound of the girl crying “Mama! Mama!” Mrs. Responsibility still hadn’t returned, and I was at a loss of how to fill the void. After a moment’s consideration, I settled on that tried-and-true parenting staple: glancing around the room uneasily while waiting for events to sort themselves out.

And, in perhaps the only stroke of luck we experienced in the whole wretched 37-hour odyssey, they did. Our linguistically-gifted friend came stumbling back into the train station, the screaming from the other bench stopped, and my night of passive child-rearing drew to an ignoble close.

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“Parentage is a very important profession," George Bernard Shaw once stated, in words guaranteed to elevate enormously the status of any story that quotes them. “But no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children."

“Also, don’t ever believe a damn thing you hear from a German rail company,” he is reputed to have said, off the record, directly after. “The trains saunter in late like unfaithful husbands, the special offers are a cruel joke, and the station platforms make very poor beds indeed. The Germans have really dropped the ball on the one thing their kultur is supposed to have mastered.”