Marty's thoughts

Imagination in Travemunde

The first thing you noticed at Travemünde was not the sea but the way people behaved as if the sea were an excuse.

In the city—where the streets ran like rules and the houses held their breath behind tall windows—one walked with purpose, even when one had none. One gave reasons for turning left, for pausing, for being seen. But here, along the promenade, reasons dissolved into the air as easily as the mist that drifted off the water and blurred the line where the world ended.

The Baltic did not glitter. It did not perform. It lay out there with the patient indifference of something older than attention, a flat expanse of gray that could brighten without becoming cheerful and darken without becoming threatening. The waves did not rise; they merely repeated themselves, as if the sea were practicing a single sentence forever, getting it no more correct and no more wrong, only more certain.

It was early in the season. The boards of the promenade still held the smell of tar and salt. A few bath cabins stood in neat rows like modest little houses that had been carried here and set down for the sole purpose of allowing people to undress without shame. Their doors were painted in colors that suggested optimism, but the paint had been weathered by so many summers that it looked like optimism that had learned restraint.

A woman passed you—middle-aged, well-dressed, and carrying a shawl over her forearm rather than on her shoulders, as if she could not decide whether she required warmth or merely the appearance of it. Her face held that expression one saw here often: a look of determined leisure. She walked slowly, not because she was tired, but because she was practicing being unhurried.

Behind her came a man with a cane, too young to need it and too proud to pretend otherwise. He used it lightly, tapping the boards in time with his steps, and you had the thought—unfair but persistent—that the cane was not for his leg but for his dignity. He wore a fine coat for the weather and a stiff collar for the air. He looked toward the sea the way a businessman looks toward a ledger: not with wonder, but with the habit of inspection, as if the water might be hiding something it should declare.

A child ran past them both, so quickly that the adults did not even bother to disapprove. The child’s hat flew off and rolled along the boards and then stopped at the edge where the promenade gave way to sand. The child ran after it and stood for a moment at the boundary, looking down at the beach as if it were a country whose customs he had not yet learned. Then he picked up the hat and ran on, satisfied, having solved a problem that had never really been dangerous.

You watched all this and realized—with the small surprise of noticing something one has always known—that here, at Travemünde, people behaved as if their lives were temporarily unaccountable. It was not that they became different. It was that the weight of being themselves lifted slightly, the way a heavy coat lifts when you unbutton it. They remained who they were, but with air between the buttons.

A bell rang somewhere behind the dunes—thin, polite, and distant. Perhaps it was a church bell, perhaps a buoy, perhaps nothing at all but the imagination of sound in fog. The morning light was white and without direction. It made the faces of strangers seem both close and unknowable, like faces seen through glass.

You had taken rooms at a modest pension not far from the water. The landlady had shown you up the narrow stairs without speaking much, but with a watchful politeness that suggested she had seen every kind of guest and mistrusted them all equally. Your room smelled faintly of starch and old roses. The window looked toward the sea, though to say so was generous; it looked toward a strip of pale sky and a brighter strip beneath it, and the mind imagined the rest.

On the small table near the bed stood a vase with three thin branches and no flowers. You thought, absurdly, that the branches were there to instruct you. They seemed to say: nothing is required of you here except to look.

You had come for rest, you told yourself. That was the respectable reason. You had come because the doctor had used certain words—fatigue, nerves, circulation—words that made your condition sound like a machine that required oil. You had come because the air was supposed to be good. You had come because others came.

And yet, sitting there on the edge of the bed, hearing the sea not as a roar but as a continuous soft rehearsal, you felt another reason rise quietly behind the official ones.

You had come to see what remained of you when no one asked you to be anything.

The first day at Travemünde is always like that. One arrives with one’s life packed carefully in trunks—habits folded, duties buttoned, anxieties tucked into corners—and then one opens the window and discovers that the air does not care. The air enters without permission. It touches everything. It does not ask what it is touching.

Later you would join the promenade at the proper hour, when everyone had agreed that walking constituted health. You would learn the faces, not by names but by rhythms: the couple who argued softly and never stopped, the old woman who walked as if she were counting her steps to avoid counting her years, the young man who watched the others too carefully and pretended he was only watching the sea.

For now you simply sat, and allowed the quiet to become audible.

Outside, on the boards, footsteps passed like mild thoughts. Somewhere a laugh broke—short, surprised, and quickly ashamed of itself—and then it was gone. The sea continued its sentence.

You began to suspect that Travemünde was not a place where one found answers.

It was a place where questions learned to lie down.