It is late September 1944, and the S-Bahn system has lost a lot of rolling stock. And yet, trains keep coming, trackage repaired amazingly promptly. But the rolling stock that arrives comes with fewer and older cars, much older ones.
Elfie has a long walk to the station every morning, thirty-five minutes at a brisk clip. She stuffs the last bite of her brown toast in her mouth, grabs her warm jacket and school bag and dashes out the door.
She tries to remember winding her watch at bedtime, but it’s always unreliable. and so is the electric clock above the stove, seeing hydro is cut off at odd hours and restored later.
Now Elfie runs along the sidewalk, looks for Erika who lives just up the street and should be leaving right about now if she is to catch the train that takes them to the northern outskirts of Berlin. There is a high school still operating. But Erika is nowhere to be seen. Elfie runs up to the next corner and checks up and down the street. A nurse in her uniform, an elderly man with an umbrella but no one else at all. Where is everybody?
She can’t be late again, must not be late yet again. The home room teacher has called her up in front of the entire class of sixty girls and blasted her last week. If she, the teacher, having to make her way out there from rubble strewn downtown, can make it to the school on time, what might be keeping Elfie, out here in the suburbs? The students yawn. So many other teachers are always late.
Elfie is ashamed of herself. Some students arrive on bicycles from villages and small towns in the region, and they appear to be making it on time.
Now Elfie is arriving at the church square, panting. The big clock on the tower has stopped working months ago. Stopped at 4:34 one day or night and that was it.
Now Elfie runs up the steps to the station, pushes open the door and squints down the fifty odd steps down to the platform. A few people are heading up the stairs. The train is in the station!
Taking two at a time Elfie races down the steps and rushes through the gate as the woman at the station master’s office raises the signal and yes, the doors have begun to close. Elfie throws herself at the train, flinging her book bag out in front to keep them from locking completely, but the bag sails through hitting a woman on the hip, while Elfie is thrown back, stumbling down on the platform, landing on her backside, her jacket breaking her fall.
The train pulls out as she gets to her feet and suddenly feels a smack hot on her cheek. “Haven’t I seen you here, in this same spot, missing your train last week?” An elderly woman, her coat full of crudely mended moth holes, looks as if she were ready to let fly again, when another woman steps between them and murmurs, “Let’s just try and all calm down. What is the calamity exactly? You have missed your train? I think we can rely on the fact that there will be another one in about — well, twenty minutes? Worse things are happening every day and night, here and out at the front, at sea. You know what I am talking about. Let’s get some perspective.”
And then she picks up her linen bag and walks towards the exit. Speechless, the slapper stares after her. What type of bizarre thinking is this? Where would we be if everyone just appeared whenever they pleased?
There is a very high premium attached to the idea of punctuality in the country of Elfie’s birth. Still.
She arrives at school forty minutes late, red-faced and sweaty, her heart pounding. The teacher rolls her eyes, puts a book face down on her desk, waits for Elfie to sit, then continues with her lesson. Elfie finds her book bag next to her chair and turns to find Erika mouthing a little message. Whew.
This is the day that Elfie decides that from now on she will be a punctual person. Do her best.
Each morning she gets up at the crack of dawn, slips into the bathroom before everyone else and races down to get breakfast ready, packs a sandwich, drinks her tea and walks out of the house. She feels tired but curiously grown up at the same time.
This is how it is going to be.