„Are we there yet?“ the child I was mumbled as the car came to a halt. I had been sleeping and was not yet awake enough to be consciously aware of the meaning of the question that had just come of my mouth, nor whom I was asking. Yet I knew that the question was connected to the sensation of the stopping car.
“No”, was the reply coming from the font of the car.
My mother’s voice sounded sharp. I did not understand what I could have done to deserve such sharpness, as I had been quietly asleep in the back of the car.
“We should be there, in fact we should have arrived hours ago. But thanks to your fathers inability to read a map we are far from there.”
I realized that I was not responsible for the sharpness in my mother’s voice. I was relieved. I did not mind being lost. I did not mind spending the night in the back of the car, being lulled in and out of sleep by the movement, blinking into the orange street lights blending into each other and listening to my parent’s voices. It was comforting to me how, as I drifted into sleep, I could still hear them talking but the words they spoke seemed to lose their meaning. It was as if my parents spoke a foreign language, like they sometimes did when they wanted to keep a secret from me, and nothing they said concerned me like the sharpness in my mother’s voice did not concern me. It was meant for my father. As long as I was not involved in their arguments about how to find the way, as long as I did not have to talk or move at all but could just stay in the warmth of my mother’s fleece jacket with which I was covered, I did not mind. I sat up just enough to peek out of the window. We stood next to a narrow road with a cornfield that seemed to endlessly extend into the flat landscape to the left and a forest to the right. The spikes of corn seemed to bend in the wind, yet the branches of the trees were utterly unmoved. The forest did not look like a forest at all. It had no depth, it seemed more like a dense wall of trees. The outlines of the treetops were visible against the sky. The sky was itself dark, but it was not as black as the wall of trees which seemed to swallow the moonlight that made everything else – the sky, the cornfield, the road – appear in different shades of grey. I looked up to the moon. I had never seen the moon as full and bright and close to the earth before. It almost seemed as if it did not float in the sky but instead stood on the hill at the end of the road, which was the only hill in sight. As I was old enough to know that things are not always the way they look, I knew the moon did not really touch the earth. The moon was actually a piece of rock going in circles around the earth. I had read in a book that was meant to get children interested in science that the moon did not simply float off into orbit because the earth was heavy and bent space like a stone on a trampoline. I did not understand how the earth could bend space like a stone on a trampoline, after all, the trampoline was just a two-dimensional elastic surface that was held by a frame while space was all around the earth. In a later chapter, they tried to explain how you could sit in a car with light-speed and spit a cherrystone at the driver in front of you. That was when I put the book away. Spitting a cherry stone at anyone seemed like a very rude thing to, and I liked long car rides, so I did not care about the hypotheticals of a car going with light-speed. But what I did take from the book was that the moon did not touch the earth at any time, even if it sometimes looked like it.
“You know what?” my father said as he held to road map out of the open window to keep my mother from tearing it out of his hands. “I give up. You’re right, it’s all my fault, I should have taken a closer look at the map. But instead of ripping the map apart and complaining, why don’t you find a solution to our problem yourself?”
My mothers voice was sharpened by anger like a pencil, so she could sting people with it. My fathers voice however began to sound like a pathetic growl, as if he was a cute little kitten that tried to impress others by pretending to be a lion but really it was just scared.
My mother did not use her sting another time. Instead she smashed the car door open, got out and walked around the car to the driver’s side. My father moved, first his legs and then the rest of his body, to the passenger seat.
My mother turned the car around, flattening some spikes at the edge of the cornfield, and drove back the way we came.
“Where, if I may ask, are you taking us?” my father hissed and I could almost see his fingers turn into cute little kitten claws that would only leave, if anything, only a soft scratch on my mothers skin if he chose to attack her.
“There was a gas station with a shop not far from here. I will ask the shopkeeper for the way.”
My father did not object.
“We should have just taken the train. Or even fly, flights are cheap if you know how to book. I grew up without a car and I never got lost.”
“You can’t make your own decisions with public transport.”
“You also don’t have to think for yourself. Since thinking is not your strength, maybe you should consider public transport. Then again, you would probably even fail to read a timetable.”
“I don’t think there would even be public transport to this place you want to go to. What’s it called again? I only remember that it had far too many consonants. We should have just stayed in Krakow for the entire week instead of driving all around the country. I told you this was going to be stressful. But you didn’t listen. You never do. What is there even too see that would make the gasoline worth it?”
“It’s a very picturesque village. Very historical.”
“So you have been there before?”
“No”
“Then how would you know?”
“From the internet”
My father raised an eyebrow.
“It’s new to all of us” my mother mocked him. She would always make fun of him for not going with the times, at least not when it came to technology.
When we reached the gas station, my father stretched his neck to peek inside the small shop. Behind the counter sat an elderly man. He did not move. Maybe he was asleep. From the distance and though the dirty shop window, it was impossible to see whether his eyes were closed. The shop was brightly lit. I wanted to go inside, where the light was, like a moth that is attracted to a glowing light bulb. But I did not want to move.
“He probably doesn’t even speak English.”
“You say that about everyone we meet abroad. Did it ever turn out to be true?”
“No, because we usually talk to younger people in cities. This is the middle of nowhere and he could be your grandfather.”
He was exaggerating. The man was really not that old.
“Maybe he speaks German. And if not, understanding directions in Polish can’t be that hard.”
My father laughed. “Where did you learn Polish? On the internet?”
They both got out of the car and my mother opened the back door as well.
“Do I have to come outside?” I asked, but without further protest I did as I saw my mother’s look. I did not want to be stung by her voice.
The cool breeze made me shudder and I wrapped my mother’s fleece jacket tightly around my shoulders.
I followed my parents into the small shop. As we entered, a bell rung and the man at the counter raised his head. He was not a statue. I was blinded by the white light inside the shop. Now that I was surrounded by it, the moon, which I could still see outside the shop window, seemed like a much more attractive light source. I remembered that I read in the science book that the moon does not glow itself. It reflects the light of the sun.
My mother went up to the man and asked him if he spoke English. He said “yes” and I did not listen after that. I studied the candies on the shelf next to the counter. The names were sometimes strange but I recognized the packaging design. On another shelf, there were pale croissants wrapped in plastic. The shape was like the moon, but in a different moon phase. I looked outside again. The moon was a perfect circle, but the bottom side was covered by treetops. I wanted a better view of the moon.
I tapped my father on the arm.
“Can I go look at the moon?”
He nodded. I knew he had not listened to me. He was busy trying to make sense of the man’s instructions and trying to remember the Polish word for “Thank you” for when he finished. But an absent-minded nod is enough consent for a child who wants something.
I left the shop and went over to the car to get the emergency flashlight out of the trunk. I knew to get the best possible view of the moon, I had to go on top of the hill where it seemed to touch the earth. It did not seem far away. I did not know then that the moon isn’t the only thing that sometimes looks closer than it actually is. Hilltops do, too. Especially at night. My reasoning was that if Albert Einstein could spit a cherry stone at someone driving in front of him, I could walk up that hill and back my parents wouldn’t even notice I was gone.
However, the way back to where we had first stopped was already longer than I thought. At one point I wondered whether I had started walking in the wrong direction. So I chose to run so I could still try the other direction and get back to the car in time. I did not need to try the other direction. I found the spot again. The fields and trees were the same in either direction, but I could see the broken corn spikes where my mother had turned around. I looked down and up again to the moon, still covered at the lower edge by treetops. It looked like I just had to walk straight ahead up the hill to get there. For a while, the road continued in that direction, so I walked in the middle of the pavement, always listening out for cars. There were no cars. The only sound I heard was the sound of my own steps and now and then a rustle in the woods. There was now a black wall of trees on both sides of the road. From time to time I looked up to see the moon, but it was completely covered in trees. All I could see was a faint glow in the sky. It was enough for me to know I was going in the right direction. However, the road soon didn’t anymore. It took a sharp turn and I had not yet reached the top of the hill. The only way to get there was through the woods. I wasn’t exactly afraid of going in there, it just seemed impossible. The wall of trees did not look like it was made out of trees with space between them, it looked more like one big block of blackness. I approached it slowly, expecting to bump into the wall. Instead, the wall swallowed me. With every step, the black surrounding me grew thicker and I realized that I had now become part of the wall. I was inside it. I felt a short burst of panic, like that time I realized I couldn’t open the lock of the bathroom stall at school and was trapped for the entire lesson. Or every time I lost my mother in a shopping mall when I was younger. Now, of course, I was already big and not afraid of losing my mother in a shopping mall anymore. On the contrary, I was excited when I was outside without her because it made me feel free. However, I was afraid of losing the moonlight. I stood there in the dark, unable or unwilling to move, breathing heavily for some moments or maybe many moments. Then I finally remembered the flashlight I had put into the pocket of my mother’s fleece jacket. I turned it on and as the light fell onto the trees and bushes around me and gave them depth and different shades, I realized that the wall of trees was not a wall at all. It was just trees with space between them. I could walk through the space. I was not trapped.
The flashlight helped me see where I was stepping, however it did not show me the right direction. I could not see the moon at all anymore, so I had to orientate myself otherwise. I decided to just walk uphill, after all, I wanted to get as close to the moon as I could. As fast as I could. I started to worry about my parents. I knew they would already have finished talking to the shopkeeper. They would be looking for me, so I had to hurry up if I didn’t want to get in trouble. I took bigger steps through the woods. In order not to fall over a root or step with my sandals into a bush of nettles, I shone the flashlight at the ground and not in front of me. I bumped into a tree once or twice, and my hair got tangled in branches. The hill got steeper and I had to hold on to whatever support my hands could find in front of me. I grabbed a plant and it ripped out as I held onto it, but finally the ground seemed to become more even. I must have reached the top, I thought, and I looked straight up at the sky. But the sky was nowhere to be seen between all the branches and leaves. To see the moon, I had to find a clearing. I did not know in which direction to go, so I just walked straight ahead. After a while, it seemed to me that the trees became fewer and the spaces between larger. So I kept going until I could finally see the first ray of light shine into the darkness. I turned off my flashlight, because it was distracting, and followed the natural light. I could see the last row of trees now, and behind them, light so bright that my heart sunk. The sun had already risen. I had lost track of time, my parents had already left without looking for me, they had left me behind somewhere in Poland. Tears welled up in my eyes from the sudden panic and anger. I ran toward the light, I flew out of the wall and felt grass with the tips of my toes that had grown over the edge of my sandals. At first the light hurt my eyes that had gotten used to the darkness of the forest, but then I began to see.
The light did not come from the sun. It came from the moon. The moon was in front of me, it was a radiating disc and it touched the ground. I looked up. There was no moon in the sky. All I could see the moon in front of me, a disc higher than the treetops, so high I had to painfully contort my neck to see the top. I ran towards the edge of the moon and discovered that it was two-dimensional. The disc was held upright by two stabilizing structures at the back. From the back, the moon looked like an enormous cardboard cutout. I went closer and touched the back of the moon without fear. It was indeed cardboard. Walking around the other edge of the moon I could see into the many layers of cardboard the moon was made of, in addition to a layer of metal on which the lightbulbs were installed. The moonlight came from lightbulbs which covered the entire front of the moon. I could not get too close because the lightbulbs were producing a lot of heat. The power seemed to come from the beginning of a thick cable at the back. The rest of it was under the ground. I wondered where the cable was plugged in. I wondered who had put the moon here and why. I did not wonder where the moon in the sky was however. Back then it seemed natural to me that this moon was the moon I had been looking at all my life and that the science book was wrong about the moon being in the sky. I knew better now. The moon was a cardboard cutout on a hill in Poland. I ran around the moon two more times, then I remembered my parents. Even though I could just walk in my own steps and rush downhill, the way back took longer. My legs were heavy with the secret I now carried.
By the time I arrived back at the gas station, the car was gone and my mother alone was there. She sat on a camping chair next to the small shop holding a paper cup. When she saw me, she dropped the cup, ran towards me and did what all parents do when they have been worried. She scolded me, but she did not do it with a pencil voice. I did not say a word. I was worried that if I did, my secret would spill out as well. I looked over her shoulder. There it was, the moon. I knew it would soon be turned off because the sun was already starting to rise. I wondered who flicked the switch.
My mother called my father and told him he could stop driving around looking for me. She told the shopkeeper he did not need to call the police after all. They soon gave up asking me where I had been and what I had been thinking. I did not reply and the answers seemed obvious: Somewhere in the surrounding countryside. Nothing.
With a considerable delay, we arrived in the “picturesque village” my mother had read about on the internet. Whether it was picturesque I could not tell because I did not know the meaning of that word. There was not much to see. There was one of everything: one shop, one pub which I liked because they served french fries, one church full of elderly ladies, one abandoned synagogue, one bridge where a man would sit and catch fish, one homeless person with three fingers who kissed my mother’s hand when she gave him money and one hotel, where we slept. It was full of angel figurines and depictions and at night, the curtains were drawn. Only of the dogs there was more than one. And at one in the morning, they would all start howling. I alone knew they were howling at a cardboard cutout.
After we came home from that trip, the summer holidays passed and a new school year began. I soon didn’t think about the moon anymore. Whenever I looked at it, it was always high in the sky. I grew up and read increasingly difficult science books with more numbers in them and less pictures, but everywhere I looked, it said the moon was in the sky. And what my senses could perceive and what was written in science books was reality to me and I cared a lot about the difference between reality and fantasy. People who are not able to make that difference, I was told, needed professional help. I didn’t want to be one of them because I still did not like to talk and I was told that psychologists always want to talk. But as hard as I tried to be sane, sometimes I was still reminded of the moon on the hill. Once I signed up for a philosophy class to get, as I expected, easy credits. It turned out that it wasn’t as easy a class as I thought, and to my dismay it involved a lot of talking, but there I learnt that I was not the only one who had seen the moon.
In the first lesson, we read a story of a man who grew up in a cave and all he could see are shadows. Then when he was freed from the cave, he saw the real nature of things but as he returned to tell the others in the cave about it, they did not believe him.
I wondered what the moon looked like to Plato. After all, they had no light bulbs in ancient Greece.
I never visited the place again where I had first seen the moon. I do not believe in the reproducibility of these experiences. But ever since realizing I am not alone, I don’t look away anymore when I see forms from afar that do not seem real. They are but the fringes of reality. I don’t do that anymore, but if you are very young or very brave you can walk towards them and look at them closely. But know that if you do, the world will never be the same to you.
