Archives for posts with tag: Poland

ONCE BITTEN FOREVER SMITTEN

February 26, 2015 //
1

It’s Not Enough To Dream

Haresh Shah

warsaw
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. Oscar Wilde

It’s not unusual for small but ambitious publishers to be bitten by the idea of adding Playboy to their stable of publications. Bitten even harder are the ones who have had no familiarity with the publishing business. But they have dreams and the desire and some money to spare that drive them to near obsession, do everything in their power to buy the Playboy license. Because in their dreams and the desires what they are thinking is: If only I can get to publish Playboy! At this point they are not thinking what it really takes to undertake such a project. Their psychological business plans have no provision for what if it doesn’t quite work out?

The letter came forwarded from Andreas Odenwald – our editor-in-chief in Germany. Guess, this is for you amigo, said his scribble. It’s an inquiry letter from Poland from the company called Elgaz. Attached to it is a recommendation letter from their German partners, a PVC window manufacturers, vouching for the serious intent and the solid financial standing of this Polish company involved in various businesses, among them the international video distribution.

What is this with video distributors wanting to be magazine publishers? Accompanying the inquiry is a video cassette giving you a virtual tour of Elgaz businesses and facilities in Gdańsk. Quite impressive, considering that this is 1991 – years and years ahead of the virtual tour ever came into existence. I reflect upon the fact that I have also had a similar inquiry from Video Vision from South Africa. The owner, Anant Singh had actually stopped by my office one evening. After I explained what was actually involved and once he understood, he let it pass. Quite the contrary with Janusz Lekztoń – the young entrepreneur of Elgaz. For him, wanting to publish Playboy is not just a business proposition, it is his lifelong dream.

Following my meeting with Beata (Milewska) that January morning, I meet with Lekztoń’s designate, the journalist Jerzy Mazur (Jurek) for coffee and agree to have lunch with his boss  Lekztoń and his associates the next day.

Boyish and pudgy, Lekztoń doesn’t speak any English. Neither do the ones accompanying him, except Jurek, who also spoke Spanish. From what I understood, Elgaz, as the name suggests was once a company that supplied household and industrial natural gas in Poland, the company Lekztoń had come to inherit during the shuffle at the fall of the communist era. No longer in gas business, his main income stream currently is international video distribution. That is, to acquire territorial rights, have the foreign movies dubbed in Polish and distribute them to the households through retail outlets.

Of the five of us sitting around the table, the interchange takes place only between Jurek and I. He is the communicator for Lekztoń, and if we were to reach an agreement, it would be him who would become the editor and the publisher. Though he would later tell me that he too had in mind Tomasz Raczek as his editor. I spend a pleasant lunch with Lekztoń and his associates. We stroll around the old town square with his photographer trailing us. They are gracious hosts and want to show me the past and fortunately undestroyed glory of one of the Europe’s most beautiful town squares.

The square is garlanded by the rows of three to five stories buildings butted together, each painted individually in vibrant colors that wear the sunny glow of the warm fall leaves – yellows, oranges, reds and pinks and the cooler but equally a s vibrant aqua marine and green. Those fairy tale houses remind me of the canal front row houses in Amsterdam and also the houses on  Prague’s Old town Square. To see them within a day of having saddened by those dour panaleks as the Czechs call their pre-fabed clapped together wall panels communist housing complexes and juxtapose them with the Old Town houses make for a quick history lesson in the country’s recent past. Paved cobblestones, the square takes me to what must have been the glorious past of Poland.

We eat at one of the traditional Polish restaurants, table bedecked with crisp white table clothes under the bright yellow ones, propped on which are turquoise napkins. Antique wall hangings and all. They are trying to show me the best that their country has to offer, which makes for a very pleasant and laid back afternoon.

Even though it’s clear to me that other than his dream and the intense desire to be Playboy publisher, Lekztoń and his people don’t have a clue about how magazines are made. And yet, Lekztoń has already produced a “test issue” in the form of a complete prototype dummy which they present to me. It contains basic Playboy layout with lot of crudely photographed “original” nudes, assigned and produced by Lekztoń himself. His personal vision of Playboy. In his book Jurek reports Lekztoń saying, he spent several hundred million zlotys to create the “sample issue”. Even though Jurek warns him that Playboy rarely allows it’s international editions to publish domestic photos. The majority of the Playmates are born in U.S.A.. Only a few are models from other countries and they usually apply for American citizenship.

When I met him, I thought Jurek was quite knowledgeable and an earnest journalist. Where he got the above notion and the information is a mystery to me. Perhaps his own perception of how things worked at Playboy. But what I do believe to be true is him saying that Lekztoń’s mind the text in the magazine existed just to fill the pages and therefore not worth his while to pursue. He thought that Jurek could write most of it, if not all. At least he didn’t even pretend to have his readers buying his version of the magazine for the interviews. Lekztoń had enough financial backing – he had everything that Polish Playboy could buy for money, continues Jurek. But I am getting ahead of myself. I thank Lekztoń for his hospitality and tell him that we weren’t yet quite ready to launch in Poland, but would certainly meet with him once again when the time comes.

Ten months later I return to Poland and hop a plane from Warsaw to Gdańsk and visit the offices of Elgaz. I no longer remember the offices as such, but what I remember very distinctly is their warehouse size space furnished with large industrial bare metal shelves. Piled onto them are hundreds and hundreds of VCR machines. Masters and slaves. Rolf (Dolina) defines them for me. He has accompanied me to Gdańsk. Seeing question mark on my face, he explains: the ones on the top contained the master tapes and the bottom ones – the slaves were there to copy them, one at a time. All those machines, hissing and blinking in chorus!

As we stroll down the wide aisles of the masters and slaves operation and hear Lekztoń talk and explain and watch the expressions on his face, no longer sure of being considered for the license, I notice a certain sadness color his face. His lifelong dream of publishing Playboy in Poland fading, he seems lost. That’s how much smitten he is. I wonder if he ever realizes that he would be far from being qualified to publish any magazine, let alone Playboy. Had he by a fluke of nature ever gotten to do Playboy, what a tragedy would that be?

Months later we would sign with Rolf – form a joint venture company with additional participation of Beata (Milewska) and Tomasz (Zięba).  It takes another year before we’re ready to launch in Poland with the first issue coming out in November of 1992, with the December cover date.

It’s a big success. While Hungary and Czechoslovakia bring in minimum to fair revenues, Poland being the much larger market, turns out to be quite profitable business venture. The magazine becomes talk of the town. Lekztoń and Jurek are obviously distraught and disappointed, but Jurek certainly understands why we would choose Beata over Lekztoń as our publisher. Still, I give Lekztoń the credit for being the first one from Poland not only to envision Playboy in the Polish market,, but also pursue it till the end.

A year later, I receive a press clipping of an excerpt from the book Jurek is writing about his experience working with Lekztoń. The excerpted chapter is titled: How the Gdynia Playboy Was Not Created. Enclosed also is a cover letter from Jurek. He is kind enough to have translated the contents of the clipping for me. Mentioned in it is something Tomasz Raczek supposedly said in an interview: Beata Milewska won the editorial contest organized by the American editors. Interesting. I wonder how and from where Jurek got such a notion? Plain old gossip machine? Sour grapes?

I guess even before Jurek started working with Lekztoń, he too was as bitten and smitten by the idea of brining Playboy to his country, as he narrates in the opening paragraph of the excerpt: In 1986 I was standing at the Playboy building in Chicago and I thought that the socialist system will fall some day and Playboy will enter East Europe. But I knew that only a man with big financial background may talk about the license with Christie Hefner. For him Lekztoń turned out to be that man with big financial background – and therefore a perfect man to team up with to make his dream come true. But fortunately for him and for us, the flamboyant Lekztoń would run through his fortune. Now on his own, Jurek returns back to journalism and ends his letter with telling me: It (the book) will be published at the end of this year – probably at the same time as when Lekztoń will face a trial for financial abuse.

© Haresh Shah 2015

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next

DON’T GO AWAY

No, it’s not the title of the next post. But I feel I need bit of a break to mull over the next several posts that I hope to write. I don’t want to promise the exact date of the return, but hope to make it a short break to last between two to four weeks. By then, the spring will be just around the corner. Stay tuned.

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Categories Entrepreneurs, Memoire, Playboy, Poland, Publishing

THOSE EYES

February 19, 2015 //
2

I Went Home And Cried

Haresh Shah

bea
Sitting across from me in a small windowless meeting room of the Holiday Inn in Warsaw is stunningly beautiful Beata Milewska. She is dressed in a conservative grey dress with the sharp U shaped neckline, trimmed with black satin ribbon. Underneath the geometric U are black brass buttons that run down to and below her breasts. Blonde, she wears fashionably shorter hair, reaching down just a little above her neck. Her eyes are sparking blue and smiles are amused but slight and measured. I guess her to be in her late twenties or the very early thirties.

Sitting next to her is Tomasz Raczek – supposedly to translate from English, but Beata herself is quite proficient in the language, so other than some whispered consulting, Tomasz is there more as an observer who would eventually be the editor-in-chief of the Polish edition. On my left is our Hungarian Publisher Deszo Futasz and on my right is Rolf Dolina, the man who has gotten us together in hopes that I would be positively impressed by Beata and her ability to gather a qualified team of professionals to create the Polish edition of Playboy.

After landing in still the old and the dilapidated Warsaw-Okecie Airport, as we drive into the city, I witness the remnants still of the city heavily bombed first by the German Luftwaffe in 1939, and then by the Russians in 1944 to quell the Warsaw Uprising. Both sides of the road are lined with the communist era’s drab and dark harsh apartment blocks. Making them further sinister is the shroud of the cold and the cloudy month of January. I cringe at the thought of the lives lived and of deaths and destruction and the dismay that still must permeate the day-to-day lives of its citizens. After all, it’s just little over a year since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Up until then, this is what I know about Beata. She is from Danzig – once the autonomous city state on the Baltic Sea, Gdańsk, nearby to the port of Gdynia . She is currently publishing a woman’s fashion magazine, Bea, in the image of Germany’s Burda Moden, named after its editor and publisher Aenne Burda – likewise she has named the magazine after herself. It speaks of her definite self confidence. Beata is publishing her magazine with very limited or no resources at all. Rolf has come to know of her through his regional manager Wlodzimierz Trzcinski. Beata had approached Wlodzimierz in hopes of selling ad pages to Fuji in her magazine. Instead, Fuji offers to supply all the films Bea needs in exchange of the byline that would say: shot on Fuji films. Not exactly what she is looking for, but the money she would save on films is still substantial – a sort of win-win situation. Rolf is impressed by this young, tenacious and hard working “businesswoman,” – as much as he is with her looks, smarts and sophistication.

The meeting proceeds well. With exception of the others present making their small contributions here and there – it’s basically Beata and me interacting while the rest look on. As we go through issues of Playboy page by page, me explaining and defining them, then throwing questions at Beata. She answers them with earnestness and precision. She seems not only to understand and know the nuts and bolts aspects of building a magazine from cover-to-cover, but also has a genuine feel for the product and its target audience. She has studied various editions of the magazine and has given serious thought to what kind of Playboy she would help create for her country.

As relaxed as the meeting seems, with Tomasz and I drinking beer and everyone else sipping on their coffees, the general air in the room is somewhat tense. Like that in an examination room. Me playing the part of a serious academician conducting orals to Beata’s doctoral candidate. While I am being my natural professional self as I a try to make important points, I am equally as aware of the fact how attractive the woman sitting across the table from me is. She exerts a certain aura that blends in well with her professionalism and very serious business woman demeanor. Her total attention to the every word I utter and her precise responses to my questions and the comments are refreshing. She has certainly done her homework. I can’t help but admire this young woman.

As much as we try to be discreet, frequent eye contacts are inevitable. Every time it happens, I see in her eyes a certain spark and a purple burst of light rays flashing across the table like from the old fashioned revolving flash cubes of the Kodak Instamatic camera. And yet, I know, and Beata is well aware that whether or not we would do Playboy with her hinges upon if I am impressed by her and her answers and have positively gauged her ability to pull it all together.

At the end of our meeting, that lasted a little over two hours, I feel drained. But I still have a long day ahead of me – a quick visit to Rolf’s Fuji operation in Warsaw. Have initial chat with the rep of another Polish prospect, Jerzy Mazur, who has flown in from Gdańsk. Rest of the day, I spend with Deszo and Rolf, have dinner with the Fuji crowd and by the time I return to my room late in the night, I am totally and positively wiped out.

As I hit the sack and think of the busy busy day and the people I have met, is when I realize how impressed I am with Beata. And how I am also taken by her overall beauty and the intelligence – what keeps flashing in my mind is the sparkles of her eyes and their penetrating gaze piercing through mine. As if we two were alone in that room shrouded in the darkness like that of the double apertured camera obscura with twin cones of lights rushing towards each other and colliding mid stream in a fusion. I suddenly feel spent by the undercurrent of the intensity of those two hours.

●●●

In Rolf’s opinion, Poland has the potential of being the bigger and the better market than already existing Hungary and soon to be launched Czechoslovakia. But we are in no hurry to move yet. This is January of 1991 and we have ahead of us the launch in Czechoslovakia. And Rolf’s focus is still to first strike an accord with the Czech license holder Vladimir Tichý. We have actually snuck out of Prague for a day just to get a feeling.

Now months later, smitten and encouraged by the success in Czechoslovakia, Rolf and I once again begin to talk Poland. In the meanwhile, on a quick visit to Gdynia in October with Rolf, I have a chance to see Beata again and meet her  partner Tomasz Zięba, whom she would eventually marry. I feel quite comfortable with them. Once again, should we go with it, through his Autraco Holdings, Rolf would bankroll the edition. This time around, now I no longer remember, but believe at Rolf’s suggestion we discuss and for the first time Playboy agrees to go into a joint-venture with Autraco Holdings as one of the two major share holders – Beata and Tomasz would manage the company and would also become its minor shareholders. All the logistics in the place, we begin to work on creating the Polish edition.

Of all the editions I have been a part of launching, the early days are the fun most. There are no pretentions, no pressure. No real deadlines. Something I always insist upon  – it’s a NO GO until we are well and ready. I want us to work simultaneously on three issues. Agree on the details and the definitions of the contents, assign the contributors, make dummies and then revise everything. Plan promotions and advertising campaigns, work on the launch details. This is the time when I excel in my role as the teacher and this is when the team is its most enthusiastic. This is when the adrenaline flows and the creativity takes place. This is when I am hardest on them. The suggestions turn into heavy discussions and the discussions into serious arguments. All work for the good of the magazine, because when we’re ready to launch, almost everyone is in sync. Nothing is more satisfying than the feeling that we have done the best that we could. We have created something we all could be equally as proud of.

This is when we all spend most of the time together, we bond or not, crowd the restaurants and taverns. Brain storm all the while. Still in the formative stage, we barely have proper offices. The publisher finds a space, a few desks and a couple of phone lines, a fax machine and we begin to buzz.

What they have found as our offices is a quaint single family row house on a quiet curved street away from the hubbub of the city center. The two story house is renovated with wood paneled sky lighted loft and exposed beams and the brick walls. The roof is red tiles. The admin offices are on the main floor and up above is editor-in-chief Tomasz Raczek’s office, which is where I am usually parked. Frequently joined by the celebrated artist and the art director Andrzej Pągowski. I love the cozy homey ambience. Once in a while I would climb downstairs and talk with Beata and Tomasz Zięba and their associates about the details of the launch.

Intense, and yet, they would be nice and easy days. The afternoon I still clearly remember as if it were only yesterday is when Beata and I are sitting at the edge of her desk, oblivious to the hurried steps crossing the hallway outside her office door, we are talking in whispers. Not exactly the business. And somewhere along the line we are holding hands, not unlike lovers. We have developed a special kind of rapport in which I wrote in my journal during one of those early days – we are becoming to be good friends – buddies if you may. Now she has longer hair that billow over and caress her shoulders. She is dressed in casual slacks and a loose fitting top. Her face wears her usual friendly and seductive smiles. Things are moving along fine and we’re relaxed – sitting side by side on the edge of her desk. We are reminiscing about that first time when we had sat across the table from each other at the Holiday Inn conference room, now a year and a half in the past.

‘Do you remember still?’ Beata asks.

‘How can I forget? I had immediately fallen in love with you, you know? I was so taken by how beautiful you were! And the blinding sparkle of your blue eyes! But I had to maintain my professional demeanor and concentrate on doing my job.’

‘While I was a nervous wreck.’

‘I know, it was tense. But nervous?’

‘And then your intense gaze! As if you were looking right through me. Your deep dark brown eyes, penetrating like two sharp arrows. It was difficult controlling myself.’

‘No!!!’

‘Yes.’ She responds. And then there is sudden silence between us.

‘I came home and cried!’ I hear her whisper.

© Haresh Shah 2015

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS – The list and the synopsis of all 90 published blog posts.

Next Friday, February 27, 2015

ONCE BITTEN FOREVER SMITTEN

Yup! That’s the power of cuddly Bunny for you. A story of the young man’s falling in love with the idea of publishing Playboy in Poland, while having no clue what it really takes to create a magazine. But when you’re in love?

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Categories Eastern Europe, Entrepreneurs, Memoire, Playboy, Poland, Profile

LIVIN’ LA VIDA LOCA…

March 21, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

From Sleazy Sex Show To The Celebration Of Suave Saxophonist’s 50th

sax_coaster3b

When I was based in Munich, it wasn’t unusual for me to start my day with breakfast in Munich, have lunch in Essen and land in Paris just in time for dinner and the next evening have dinner in Milan. Georg Kührer of the printing house Girardet once observed: you hop on and off the plane more often than I do a bus. Amazing. But true. Even so, the eleven days I remember the most about my relentlessly on the go happened years later when I was living in Chicago. What to me is mind-boggling still, is the intensity of those days, being in constant motion and deprived of sleep. And I don’t even drink coffee, let alone take any other stimulants. I thrived on the natural adrenaline and the high I got from interacting with people.

I began my journey in Chicago on the afternoon of Thursday, October 15,1992, arriving in Budapest the next morning.  I loved the way the airlines wine and dine you in the front of the plane on their intercontinental flights. No phones ringing, nowhere you can escape. I am not for watching movies or doing any real work on planes. Reading yes. But mostly what I love the most is to really let my hair down, enjoy the treats, perhaps snooze a little bit and arrive at my destination, if not well slept, quite relaxed.

My weekend visit had a certain urgency about it. Our original publisher, Dezso Futasz  had decided to get off the rat race, but was conscientious enough to bring a group of people, headed by Geza Panczel of Interart Studio  to take over the Hungarian edition. All three parties had agreed on the terms of transfer, contingent upon me approving the new organization. So I plunged right into the process soon after checking into the hotel. Meeting after meeting after meeting and then dinner at one of the new partners’ home, is how the day went.  Just before the dinner, Dezso had bowed out, leaving me in the care of Geza and his associates. After dinner, the last thing I wanted to do on that night was to go out to Bangkok – a topless bar. Hoping I would catch up on sleep the night after. But no such luck. Instead I found myself sitting on the edge of the stage at the place called Caligula. Caligula was nothing like anything I had ever experienced before. It featured explicit live sex that contained lot of rubbing, slurpy oral sex and frequent copulation – all of that happening just a few feet away from your nose. I don’t know what they were thinking, but that in itself should have been a reason enough for me to disqualify them. If this was their image of Playboy, what would they do to the edition once they got their hot hands on the license to publish the magazine? Sexually oriented yes, but how could I possibly trust them to produce the lifestyle magazine of the highest editorial standards?

So it had to be Dezso pursuing me with a gentle pressure, Geza and his associates putting forth their best foot. In sharp contrast to our social outings, I was quite impressed by their current offices and the publishing activities, which mainly contained of fine arts and literary books. Their offices had more of a feeling of a somber English library than the one bustling with the young men about town.  They seemed serious contenders.  And how can you not like Geza? A low key intellectual who looked so much like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead  that I fully expected him to break out and begin singing  to lay me down, one last time. Plus, he took me home to his mother Idolka’s house for lunch next afternoon and then we had dinner at the restaurant owned by the group – the pizza joint called M*RXIM, with the A spelt with a red Russian star in defiance of the just fallen communism. The place was extremely popular with the young set.  Having been around in the former Iron Curtain countries good part of three years, I had observed that the sudden freedom had brought out the dormant entrepreneurship of their people and they were game for anything that would make money.

I wrapped up my visit to Budapest with an optimistic outlook.  More urgently waiting for me in Warsaw were my Polish publishers Beata Milewska and Tomasz Zieba. Only three weeks away from launching my third edition in the Eastern bloc. The content needed to be finalized,  plans for the launch revised and action plan put into place. This phase of launching of the new edition has always been the most exciting. With all that hard work behind us, now we had to make things happen. It was a feeling similar to that of an actor’s anxiety just before the curtain rises. Gave me a chance to get to know Beata a bit more. A dynamic young lady who would become one of the most successful publishers of Playboy family. Her partner in the venture, Tomasz accompanied me to Prague to pick up pointers from Ivan Chocholouš, the managing director of the Czech edition, who had very successfully launched  the magazine merely a year and a half earlier.

It’s already Friday, eight full days since I left Chicago, and not one single night I have had good eight hours sleep. And the real challenge of this trip still lies ahead of me. In order for me to succeed, the Murphy’s Law had to work to the perfection in the reverse order. Anything that can go right, will (must) go right.

Just imagine this: I depart Prague at 11:00 on Saturday and am scheduled to arrive in Frankfurt at 12:20.  I have forty minutes to connect to the flight to Hamburg. Having arrived from Czechoslovakia meant I would have to go through passport control and negotiate my way through the sprawling monster – that is Frankfurt International Airport – to get to the domestic departure. But I make it, just in the nick of time. I arrive in Hamburg at around 14:15. Since my baggage is checked in from a non-EU country, however perfunctory, it is still subject to the customs inspection.  I have the train to catch at 15:29 from Hamburg Altona to Westerland-Sylt. To make it across the city to the train station in just less than an hour in the afternoon traffic in itself is daunting. But I just can’t afford to think in those terms. Because I have promised my dear friend and fellow Scorpio, Andreas Odenwald – ex-editor-in-chief of the German edition, that I will be on the island of Sylt for his 50th birthday celebrations.  And so I am. I make every connection, tight as they were.  If that meant me sprinting from one plane to another, nervously rubbing my hands together while the cab sped along Hamburg streets, buying my ticket and making onboard the train just minutes before it slithers out of the platform. Arriving triumphantly in Westerland-Sylt on time at 18:17.

Andreas is waiting  for me on the platform. He gives me a hug: amigo! He says. Hotel Stadt Hamburg – where the shenanigans has already began – is only a short walk from the station.  I check in, park my suitcase in my room and come down for a quick beer and greet everyone who’s there. There are about fifteen to twenty guests occupying the dining room. Some of them I already know. Andreas’ life-long partner, Gudrun Thiel, Rainer Wörtmann and his wife Renate. And I see two very pretty ladies, they look quite familiar, but am not sure. They both smile at me and go, Eva Peters, Bettina von Beaust.  Of course. They must realize that my memory of them was from 1975, when both of them were ever so schlank, so their now Bottero-esque figures have me confused. But they seem comfortable in their evolution, which puts me at ease. There is no one else I recognize or remember, except in my agenda, there is a little note that says: meet Brigitte – interesting!  And like the saxophone aficionado – the birthday boy would have said: let the good times roll. And so they do. Between apèritif and digestif, the delicious home-made pasta with button mushrooms and wild duck in pepper crème sauce are washed down with appropriate wine pairings. And still waiting eagerly is the birthday cake with the colorful saxophone motif.

The clock is already ticking beyond 03:30 in the morning. I have the train to catch at 05:50 to take me back to Hamburg. Waiting for me at the station would be Michelle and Rüdiger, with whom I will have  breakfast before catching the Lufthansa flight at 10:45 to Frankfurt, connect with their Chicago bound flight at 13:00, and in the evening meet up with our visiting Dutch publisher, Meinard Carper and his advertising director, Auke Visser.

‘I guess, I can take a quick nap and a shower before catching that train.’ I say to no one in particular. By then all of us are wasted and more than ready to hit the sack. But nope! Leave it on Rainer.

‘It doesn’t make any sense to go to bed now. How about another bottle of champagne? And then we’ll walk you to the station.’

‘Warum nicht?’ I answer, as if on auto pilot. And I see a wide smile cross Rainer’s big square face, made it cuter by dimples on his shriveling cheeks and his small baby teeth. As if saying: That a boy! So we order another bottle. At around five thirty, I go upstairs to my room, pick up my suitcase, pay DM 230.- (approx. $115.-) for the room and whoever is still around, practically roll me back to the station and wave until the train slides out of the platform in the early morning fog.  One would think there would be nobody on the train that early on a Sunday morning. But there is a group of rambunctious youngsters. So I upgrade myself to the first class, slide doors shut, pull the curtains close and crash like a sand bag.

I have always loved trains at the night and the rhythm of their synchronized motion.  It lulls me to deep sleep almost right away. Relaxed, exhausted and deprived of  sleep all week long, I slip into a comfortable semi-coma. When I regain consciousness, all I sense is the total darkness and the pin drop silence. The train is stand still. Probably waiting its turn on the embankment, I think. Not even a peep, nor a sliver of light coming through.  Now I feel the train moving a little bit. And then I feel it stopping, suddenly. Following that, there is a loud thumping on the locked doors of my compartment.

‘Hamburg, Hamburg. End station. Bitte aussteigen.’ I am not sure, if this is real or it’s a dream. But the knocking continues, like the pounding of a heavy hammer. I spring up like  Jack in the Box. Disoriented no more, I slide the curtains and open the door.

‘Gott sei dank. Sie sind da. Hamburg. Aussteigen sie bitte.’  Seeing me well and alive, the conductor looks relieved. Frazzled, he tells me that if not for my friends on the platform, I would have ended up at the nearby train depot, nestled between half a dozen other idled trains. As I emerge from my car, Michelle flashes her sweet dimpled smile. They scurry me over to the airport right away. I check in first and then we sit in a café to have some breakfast.

No dramas or the time crunch with connecting in Frankfurt. We land in Chicago on time at around three in the afternoon. It is past four when I make it back home. I set the alarm and stretch out on my soothingly warm water bed. I am picking up Meinard and Auke for dinner at 19:30.  I feel energized as I walk to the garage. I put the key in the ignition of Nora Nissan,  as I call my car. The engine squawks, as if in excruciating pain and I hear the fan turning once or twice. And then the hood shudders sideways and pfffft. Sudden death!   

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, March 29, 2013

THE STORY OF MY TUXEDO

Up until then I had successfully avoided having to buy my own tux. Cheap? Also. Cultural antipathy? Maybe. But mainly because I never saw any sense in owning something that I would wear less times through my entire life than I could count on my fingers. And I could always rent one if I must.

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Categories Eastern Europe