From fifth to tenth grade I rode the bus with the other students from Gomaringen, only one of whom, Anja S., was in my homeroom. Bronnweiler, where Dani lived, was barely two miles away, but on a different bus route. If I stayed after school for physics club (in which I enrolled hoping to learn how cars worked, in order to impress boys), or choir (in which I enrolled because I loved the power of the Carmina Burana’s “Dies Irae,” though I could neither sight-read alto, nor hit the high notes on soprano)—if I stayed after school for these, or anything else, I sometimes ended up riding the bus home alone, and then I always hoped Roland would be driving.
Roland never drove before noon, so all my memories of him are set against the relieved exhaustion of a school day done, light always from the southwest, sun still high but shouldering downward. He was broad, with eyes the color of a robin’s egg behind thick glasses, strawberry blond hair like a trimmed mop, and a terribly pockmarked face. There was something comforting about his scarred skin: the inflammation that had caused the marks had faded away, like a landscape of permanently inactive volcanoes. This too shall pass, his face said, of my acne and of everything else that plagued me. My tragically boring hair did not matter, even badly permed (with bangs that earned me, from Dani, the nickname Atompilz, “Mushroom Cloud”). Neither did my not-big-enough-for-beauty eyes. We were always sitting down, so even my height was irrelevant. It did not matter that I was not quick. No one expected wittiness of me, or a facility with drama. It did not matter at all what I said, only that I was there.
Sometimes even when there were kids I knew riding the bus I’d climb into the very front seat, under the sign reading Während der Fahrt nicht mit dem Busfahrer sprechen—“Do not speak to bus driver during the drive.” I remember his face always turned toward me, but the bus could not move more surely if it were on tracks. His pale eyes sometimes disappear behind the sky reflected in his glasses, but the face is kind even then. He speaks a dialect I hear from no one else, Swabian from up in the foothills of the Alps, its r’s rolled crazy, far back in the throat: the language of laughter beaten down, and yet alive.
[excerpt from “Tender”]