Episode 2. Germany in Argentina
by Kipras Kaukenas
by Kipras Kaukenas
I am in a little town called Bilduungstad. The name might say it all, considering the fact I am in Argentina. It’s a German town sequestered between gray serpentines, surrounded by lucid and Colgate toothpaste patterned sierras. The architecture is purely German. Tiny cottage houses made of red bricks stretch through the streets, some of which still have thatched roofs under which, hanging by the gable, you can see some haughty, terrifying, and too familiar coats of arms basking in Argentina’s sun. Young fair-headed Aryans running past me fill the pavements and wary old ladies in checkered aprons, hunched, with sprinklers in their hands watering various plants, mesmerize me through their monotonic existence.
I cannot help but think how these people ended up here. The image of a submarine, like some Noah’s Ark, is filled with everything German, sauerkraut, beer, Hegel’s books, and whatnot, preparing for the trip to the destined land of Patagonia, are upsurging my mind’s eye. I am trying to fill the loose pieces and complete this puzzle. Who could have anticipated their arrival? And here they are in their fated destination, with preserved history and culture and perhaps even purposefully ambiguous to everything that’s happening outside this little bubble, for they have everything that’s needed for a German soul to thrive. Why haven’t I heard of their existence in these lands, this exotic and odd phenomenon, through some source or another? Maybe I’ve witnessed even more inconceivable things by an accident click on YouTube or a story of a friend who told about his own accident click, but being here, in this pure actuality, pulverizes all beliefs and from now on I am more inclined to believe in ghosts or myths.
“Was ist das?”
I look at his innocent and curious eyes, perplexed, and simply smile. I raise my hands and shrug my shoulders and he inquires further, “du sprichst nicht Deutsch?”
I shrug my shoulders once more, then he calls his friends and I am surrounded by a bunch of German Argentinian kids who form a semicircle and even take a few steps backward, feeling myself to be an epicenter of this overwhelming dream. My amazement of this phantasmagoria should have ended if it was merely a dream? I pinched myself once more, to the jovial and entertaining reaction of these little bastards, who by now called the adults to join their recently made discovery of a foreign man in their foreign world. And now I stand with my feet rooted to the ground amid more than thirty inquisitive pairs of eyes. From behind the crowd approaches a man in his forties, with a tight jaw and barely any lips, bushy brows; he’s holding out to me a clay mug with the liquid I couldn’t mistake for anything else in the world. It’s beer! And as I take the beer mug, he exclaims: “Wilkommen in Deutschland lieber besucher.”
“Ich bin out…” I try to say, but I fall short, and my attempts are drowned in the merry tumultuous laughter of children who are now pulling me by the arm and tucking onto my heavy backpack. I think I’ll never leave this place; they’ll imprison me as some exhibition piece, as something not German. I chug my beer and try to bid my adieu. At last, I manage to escape the clutches of those little beasts and find an escape from the crowd. I turn my gaze to their direction for the last time and see a horde of German souls investigating my every moment, just like I do theirs.
