Sarah Caulfield
A Lesson In History Repeating Itself
I live in Germany before the election.
I am the youngest of the teachers here, baby-faced, mistaken for the sixteen-year-olds
I am attempting to instill a love of Shakespeare into.
I stand in amongst the scrape of blue plastic chairs and say:
Romeo and Juliet is a play about the human cost of hatred.
It is about what we are capable of doing to each other.
I fail to see the dramatic irony.
My students ask me what I think will happen, as though I am rendered an expert—
One English-speaking nation might seem the same as the other.
Brexit on my back, citizens in glass houses ought not to throw stones.
They ask with all the latent anxiety of a world who knows what
America does does not end at the close of its borders.
In this way, all of us are foreigners. There we are, I think, and I think some more:
Of how I have learnt to kill spiders here, the ones who crawl in through the holes of the
Farmhouse walls. How all they ever wanted was to shield themselves from the rising,
Burgeoning cold of a Bavarian winter.
How something about the look of them set something off in me, some quiet kind of
Loathing. Enough for me to kill them with my book.
Even then, I didn’t want to touch them with my hands.
I think of how I am capable of teaching, with all the calm rationality of someone
Rapidly slipping into authority, finding a way for the role to fit them—how I am able
To say there must be more than hate, and still drop heavy judgement.
He was asking for it. I catch myself in the thought.
Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
My colleagues tell stories: of smuggling books past the Berlin Wall as schoolgirls,
Orwell slipped into the hands of a East Berlin punk—
For long has there been a history of rendering youth inarticulate, inward-facing,
A people made up of ever smaller rooms of selfishness.
Romeo and Juliet is about the human cost of hatred.
It is about what we are capable of doing to each other.
It is, also, just as importantly, about the integrity of a teenage girl.
They tell me of American shops built around the army base no German child could enter, and of
Robin Hood made manifest in a single military brat, using her identity card to smuggle her friends
Inside, into a unfolding sweep of candy aisles, into mouthfuls of warm sugar. Solidarity.
When I mention American politics to my colleagues, they sigh.
They understand the currency of fear better than I do.
And months later, returned to my own country, the slick privilege of a passport
Grasped between my white fingers, unquestioned at the border—
Shocked by the realisation those same borders had always been invisible, suggestive
A ley line rather than a wall—
I think of this. I think of the day after Reunification Day, sat quietly in the carpool,
Whilst my colleague, mouth aghast, told me how none of the children knew
Why there had been a national holiday.
Later, I will go to Berlin myself. I will stand,
Staring at the photographs of boys the age of my brother, photographs of boys who died
Who crashed a car through a wall and crawled,
Bleeding, gasping, shredded over gravel, past the American checkpoint
Because they knew which side of a border you breathe on matters, even when it’s your last—
But back to my colleague. His voice, stretched taut to ask a stranger,
Someone outside of this small echo of history:
What have we done, to make them forget where we came from?
Sarah Caulfield is the author of Spine (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Lavender Review, Voicemail Poems, The Griffin, and The Mays (XXIV). She has lived in Poland, Germany, and the UK.
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