Beyond the Threshold

Nineteen years old. High-school over. What's better than a road-trip across Europe? Actually a train-trip: an Interrail! And not exactly across Europe, but only in Germany. I didn't get why everyone wanted to go to France or Spain: easy idioms and hot weather weren't for me. That's why I sold a special stamp I received for my eighteenth birthday from the Italian postal system and bought my 21 days-all second classes included-Interrail ticket! I scared the hell out of my parents. My father probably didn't show it, but my mother asked me regularly not to leave all by myself. Anyway, I sticked to my decision and when the D-Day arrived I took my big, heavy backpack and jumped on a train to Frankfurt (of course trembling and trying not to cry). The travel took almost 8 hours, during which, for obvious reasons, I didn't sleep at all. I arrived in Frankfurt at 6 in the morning. Alone, frightened that someone could steal my underwear from my luggage and most of all unable to speak a single word of that fantastic, terribly difficult and apparently very harsh language they speak up there. To comfort my poor abandoned self I decided to spend the first money of my not so loaded travel budget on one of those wonderfully fake cappuccinos they sell in that big company where they put caramel everywhere; then I took courage and put a foot beyond the threshold of the station. There I was: standing in front of a sleepy dark town, avoiding to drink the cappuccino for fear of puking and using it to rescue my cold hands (actually the weather was really warm, my hands were cold because of the anxiety), did I mention the fact that I was alone and I had a tremendous backpack? At a certain point a man, an old homeless, came close to me and told me something. Of course I didn't understand a single word and I was about to throw the beverage at him and run away shouting, but I stood, and he remained there too, almost in front of me, pulling a pigeon out of a plastic bag. The pigeon was sleeping, or at least that's what I like to think, and had a white cotton thread tied to an ankle, which went directly to the wrist of its owner, like the leash of a dog. I stepped back quite disgusted, but then I started to feel an incredible tenderness for this man and his nasty pet. And we stood there, each one alone, the one with a heavy backpack and a cup, and the other, with a dirty beard and a probably dead pigeon resting in his hand. In front of us, a dark unknown town, starting to wake up.