Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Rilke  
Kamila Forson

I boarded the train for Dresden, April 17, 2007. The sun was just coming up, and the air had a lingering winter chill. I’d recently ended a short-lived relationship with a Czech man, and, although secure in my decision, I felt uprooted with my newfound solitude, and nervous about travelling alone to a country where I didn’t know the language. I had moved abroad to Prague in 2005, and after over a year of teaching English I was offered a job at a publisher. Due to complicated bureaucratic details that are beyond the scope of this essay, I’d had to submit my application for a Czech work visa in Germany.

I spent the train ride in a compartment alone, gazing out the window. We followed a river for a while, a glassy river edged by trees on steep rocks, the sky clear blue and polished by pale, creeping light, and my nerves were such that I preferred the scenery over any other activity. I imagined a variety of complications that would prevent their issuing me a visa, having spent enough time at the Work Office and the Foreign Police to be concerned. A couple guards boarded at the border town of Děčín, and as the train swayed and started to slide along again they rattled from car to car, pushing open compartment doors to demand, “Papers!” I said, “Dobrý den,” and showed them my passport. They stamped it, giving me a stern look before shuffling past.

The train ride took about two-and-a-half hours. From the main train station I walked down Prager Strasse through the old town to the river, past the charred Kreuzkirche church that survived the bombing of February, 1945, past trams and casual cyclists on vintage bicycles with bells. I was familiar with the route from the time I’d come with my German-speaking friend to drop off my application. The consulate was a surprisingly quaint house on a shady residential street in Neustadt. The waiting room, with several windows looking out on the trees, was quiet and empty. I picked up my visa in a matter of minutes; the middle-aged ash-blonde behind the glass was almost pleasant.

Disoriented, I left without consulting the map in my backpack. I paused on the sidewalk: What now? I had several hours before catching the train back to Prague. I wanted to find a park where I could eat my pack lunch, but I didn’t want to unfold my map on the street like a vulnerable tourist. I began to walk.

I walked without knowing where I was going, yet strangely confident I would find exactly what I was looking for. So I was not entirely surprised when, at the corner of Konigsbrucker Strasse and Bischofsweg, I found a park that was exactly what I wanted — wide, sprawling, bathed in light, with trees for shade and just enough people for company. I settled in the grass under a linden tree, facing a block of colorful baroque buildings in the distance.

The sun was overhead and a church bell nearby rang a dozen times. I took off my shoes and socks and slid out of the black pants under my skirt to enjoy the warmth of spring on my legs, a spring that came suddenly every year, as though it hurried before it forgot. I ate my sandwich and opened Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a slim Dover Publications copy that a good friend of mine from college had mailed several months ago. I read, “There is only one solitude, and it is great, and it is not easy to bear… Its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of spring.” I felt my chest tighten with recognition. I underlined many passages, entire pages, and drew stars in the margins: “Your solitude will be your home and haven even in the midst of very strange conditions, and from there you will discover all your paths.” At one point I looked up. The sounds around me came from far away, the spun tangles of fiery sunlight wove through the almost summery clouds, the expanse of green, and the blue, pink, and yellow painted homes, so my memory of that moment is a hazy aura of light and color, with dogs barking and murmured German. The breeze dropped delicate spindly yellow linden blossoms between the pages and I felt, suddenly, at peace.

I carried Rilke’s words with me all the way back to Prague, stopping on the way to the train station at Karstadt, an upscale department store, for an early dinner at their restaurant overlooking the city. I also bought a brightly painted ceramic tile from a small Indian shop and once home I wrote Rilke’s words on the back with permanent marker. I sat in the overgrown yard of the old villa where I lived upstairs and looked up at the deepening light of a sky that connected me across all the moments of my life, and with my family back home, and felt an important internal shift that has served as a compass ever since.

“Why do you want to exclude any disturbance, any pain, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what these conditions are working upon you? … Since you know that you are in a state of transition and would wish nothing so dearly as to transform yourself,” he writes. Rilke is my greatest influence, not only as a writer but also — perhaps more — as a person trying to articulate a life that provokes wonder and wondering. How do I know that the pain I am in isn’t the conception of something great, something joyous? I have gone through several birth cycles over the years; and as a creative soul, sometimes lost, I like to believe that my moments of awareness and transformation are the main work I do here, even when it seems like all I’m doing is waiting.

 

Kamila Forson lives in Houston with her husband and their dog Lola.