What parents teach their children is culture;
what children teach parents is technology.
During a train trip from Frankfurt to Düsseldorf I lost a briefcase where I had carried my whole life, including the original of my next book.
I was accompanied by Judith, from the press department of Fischer, my German publisher.
“I think she's a little nervous,” my editor had warned me the day before.
"She is very young, and you are her first writer."
"Don't worry," I reassured him.
"Nothing ever happens to me."
Ha.
In Düsseldorf, when we horribly discovered my suitcase missing, we spoke to the conductor.
“They must have stolen it,” he said.
"It happens every day."
The man accompanied us to the police station, where a very serious agent attended us.
I explained to him in English what had happened.
The cop's response, who spoke English, was to go on a spiel in German.
“He says that the suitcase must have been stolen,” Judith summed up.
I replied that I already knew that,
I told that I had been in the briefcase my whole life, I asked if they could do something to get it back;
the cop sputtered in another German, even longer than the last.
"He says they can't do anything," Judith translated again.
She followed an exasperating tug of war: I asked in English that they look for my suitcase and the guy answered in German that they couldn't.
I finally understood the truth: the cop didn't want to move his ass.
Sunken, I remembered
Manchester by the Sea
, a film in which, after testifying at a police station about an appalling loss, the protagonist tries to take a cop's gun and shoot himself.
Then I phoned my son: he needed my iPad identification number to file the complaint.
“Wait a minute”, my son asked me, once I had told him about the catastrophe, and after a minute he sent me a wasap with a map of the Düsseldorf area and a rectangle in the center.
“There's your iPad”, he wrote to me.
Euphoric, I showed the wasap to the cop.
"There's my suitcase," I said.
The cop examined the map and launched into another flurry of German, during which I had the inkling that he was flirting with Judith.
"It can't be," I thought.
"He Says it's useless," Judith translated, blushing a bit (or so it seemed to me).
“He says that surely the thief has taken the iPad and has left the suitcase lying around.
He says they can't chase him and even if they knew where he is, they couldn't do anything”.
I looked at the cop again: I didn't want to take his gun and shoot myself, I wanted to strangle him.
I finished filling out the report and, together with Judith, we searched in vain for the suitcase at the station.
I didn't ask her if the useless cop had tried to flirt with her, because I realized that the poor thing was more overwhelmed than I was and, in the taxi to the hotel,
I tried to distract her by describing the survival kit she would have to help me buy the next day.
At the hotel, Michi Strausfeld, the legendary German editor, was waiting for us with whom I was to talk in the afternoon about my latest novel at Heine Haus, the great bookstore in Düsseldorf, and that night, when we said goodbye after the event and dinner, Michi told me He said: "Don't despair, Javier: I believe in miracles."
"Not me," I replied.
Hours later, still awake and praying with that furious fervor that only atheists are capable of, I nevertheless received a wasap with a map of Frankfurt and a rectangle at the train station.
“Your iPad is there,” my son would say.
"I bet in Lost and Found, with the suitcase."
"Are you sure?" I asked, incredulous.
"The iPad thing, 100%," he replied.
"The thing about the suitcase, 95%."
I immediately put a wasap to my editor, and the next morning, while having breakfast with Judith, they called me to tell me that the suitcase was at the Frankfurt station, intact.
Judith hugged me, and only then did I understand what had happened: no one had stolen the suitcase, someone had moved it on the train, and when the train reached its destination, a good Samaritan—perhaps the conductor himself—had returned it to the origin station.
What children teach parents is technology.
And I know of someone who should give the German police a course.
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