The Marktplatz and the Gänseliesl

The Goose Girl before the Rathaus in the town square

A produce vendor and her wares

Flowers in the Markt

 Emma is intrigued by the bustle of the University town of Göttingen.   When I was looking for characters for The Shadow Warriors, I  sat in the Marktplazt for an hour and watched the people walking by.  Three characters showed up.  How about them apples? Göttingen  was just a great setting for a book.  I stole great hunks of landscape and sometimes I even made up stuff, but most of the scenes were created from real places. 

Here is a glimpse of the street fair and some unpleasantness from The Shadow Warriors.

The square was jammed with students, professors, couples pushing baby carriages, old age pensioners, farmers with round peasant faces, and the Turks and Greeks who had come years ago as “guest workers” and stayed on to open restaurants and small businesses.

            We milled around, picking up the carnival mood. Wayne and Christof circled the sausage stands, while Christof earnestly tried to explain the difference between bratwurst and currywurst. Marcus and I followed a tempting odor to a booth where cauliflower and mushrooms were batter-dipped and deep-fried. A vendor wearing a leather apron over his red tabard handed us paper plates heaped with the crisp goodies in exchange for a few marks. Marlies, Petra and Gaby ordered the famed white asparagus.  Crowded together on a bench, we ate pommes frites , to cushion the alcohol to come, and drank Göttinger Pilsen, which I hoped might flush our arteries in a kind of yin-yang Germanic balancing effect. The familiar American smells of pretzels and popcorn mingled with the exotic aroma of shashlik turning on a spit.

Punk rockers, hair moussed into a rainbow of spikes, arrived, and festooned themselves on the base of the Goose Girl fountain. A guitarist with a melancholy American voice sang Where Have All the Flowers Gone? A few beggars sat stoically on the pavement, holding up hand-printed placards telling their individual tragedies.

            We passed a booth selling shots of vodka, each with a fig immersed in it. Wayne pantomimed gagging gestures, but I counted out four marks in change. As I handed the money to the vendor, I caught a glimpse of a face with dark eyes, eyes that were staring at me, but the man with the eyes slipped away into the crowd. It couldn't be. There was no way that the man from the Singapore bus and the Hong Kong Market could be at the Göttingen street fair. I downed the vodka in one hasty gulp, but the alcohol couldn’t burn away that face and those eyes.

The Institute for Advanced Computing

University Buildings in Goettingen, Germany

Was I ever relieved when a check of the Göttingen phone directory didn't turn up any computer institutes connected with the university, freeing me up to invent one. I modeled mine on the gray building in the foreground, typical of many of the older university buildings.  Bet you didn't know that the Brothers Grimm of fairy tale fame were protesters at the university way back when.  Below is the description when Emma sees her "home away from home" for the first time.

            Wayne and I had heard about this Institute for so long that it had the mythic aura of a technical Valhalla where cyber gods programmed the universe. Our taxi hit all the green lights along the Bürgerstrasse, then turned into a long driveway and stopped. A light drizzle was falling on Göttingen, and everything looked gray, especially the old tree-shrouded, limestone buildings of the university.  The university wasn't confined to a campus, but scattered all over town. Signs pointed visitors to the nearby Mathematics and Physical Institutes. Franz paid the driver, and the three of us approached the Institute along a sidewalk of gray paving bricks. Our new home away from home had three stories, with a newer white stucco addition on the side. Franz translated the inscription on the brass plaque by the entrance: “Institute for Advanced Computing.”

            In the foyer, unfurled umbrellas stood drying. A few marble steps led down to a cellar and others up to the ground floor. Wayne and I followed Franz up the stairs. The building emitted an odor recognizable anywhere. Academe. Chalk, dust, floor wax and fusty classrooms. Franz opened a heavy wooden door; we crossed a wide hall and entered a large room cluttered with desks, chairs, CRT's, shelves crammed with binders, all old-fashioned and low tech. Along the windows on the back wall furiously blooming red geraniums trailed over the big wide sills.

Many scenes in The Shadow Warriors are set in the town and the Institute.  I wish that "Warriors" was for sale on Amazon.de, but it's not.  Sigh.  Guess the English speaking world (US and UK) will be the only readers for the time being.  

The University town of Göttingen and The Shadow Warriors

Frau Eisenach, a character in The Shadow Warriors, lives on Geiststrasse, or Ghost Street. She is an old lady in a house dress who wears carpet slippers because of a painful bunion, but she is good to my main character who stops by to visit (and to eat) every now and then. Frau Eisenach cooks up a skillet of "hoppel-poppel", bacon, egg, onion,  boiled potatoes and tomatoes fried together.  An easy, delicious supper, by the way.  The University town of Goettingen is the setting for most of the scenes of The Shadow Warriors.  I made up the "Institute for Advanced Computing," but it was based on a real building.  Over the years, what is real and what I made up have sort of merged together.   Totally weird.



My inlaws lived in the town for years and I visited often, until it was easy to write about.  When I wrote the protest march scene and others I went to the library and found the microfilm of some of the events.  My nephew took me pub-hopping and several scenes resulted from that evening.   It was really fun to put my characters into the scenes and see what they would do. 


In the next post, I'll confess how I found many of my local characters.  

Add caption

Here is where the good Frau Eisenach lived. 

The Shadow Warriors and Berlin

Not a pretty courtyard, but an awful place to be trapped at night

The novel is "set up" in Asia, moves to Cambridge, MA for a few scenes and then shoots off to Germany where the bulk of the story is set.  Emma drives to Berlin (the book is set in 1989 before the wall comes down) with Peter Weber, an intriguing man who has been off-handed courting her.  She is waiting for Peter late at night  in a seedy pub in Kruezberg.  Yikes!  Glad it was her and not me. 

I walked past the kitchen down a dark little hallway. 

            Damen. The amenities lacking. Naturally no toilet paper, but instead a wet floor littered with coarse brown paper towels and a toilet that shrieked for the tidy bowl man. The room smelled as badly as it looked. I rinsed my hands in cold water, wiped them on the back of my jeans, and lunged out the door.

            While I paused in the dark hallway to let my eyes get used to the dim light, I saw that the hacker now had a companion. Famine and pestilence together again. Georgi Balakov, AKA the Disco Whisperer, was taking a careful look around the room, examining every face. Balakov, the last man in the world I wanted to encounter tonight! His guarded thoughtful eyes rested on the Eurasian girl. Was he smiling?  Now I remembered her. Luby's pretty friend from Singapore.

            What had Peter gotten me into?

            I made a hard right turn through the swinging doors and into the brightly lit kitchen. The cook, in an apron that looked like he used it to swab the bathroom floor, sat on the chopping block, cleaning his toenails with a paring knife.

"Excuse me," I blurted in English, and charged through the kitchen and out the open back door where I ran smack into a box of garbage.

            I shrank back from the slimy smell of rottenness. Somewhere in the darkness, belly dance music whined from a radio. Barely able to see, I stumbled again. Standing still, I tried to get my bearings, but the bile rose in my throat, and engulfed in a surging wave of nausea, with my hands pressed against a stone wall, I vomited the sweet beer and the dinner.

            I dried my eyes with a corner of my shirt, and wiped my mouth. The music wailed, sinuous and throbbing. Peering around, I realized that I wasn't in an alley, but a courtyard. What if I was locked in? Groping along the stone wall in the darkness, I almost fell over a bike rack. A tenement stood facing the courtyard, but only a few windows on the upper floors were lighted. A banner with a skull and crossbones hung over a window. I picked my way across the rubble and ducked around a dumpster. The screech and scream of alley cats, fighting or mating, caused a dog to respond with a deep savage bark. Not the kind of neighborhood where strangers would open their doors at night. When I hit my shin against a crate, I sobbed in frustration. How was I going to get out of here? Finally I sat on the crate and tried to gather my wits. Nearby I could hear people walking, and the noise of cars in the street. Like the sounds were coming right through a wall! My eyes were finally adjusting to the darkness. I stood up and walked around more crates until I faced a black passage. The voices were close by. I could hear footsteps, even laughter. And I could see a neon glow at the end of the tunnel. Threading my way through the clutter, I plunged into the passage and stumbled my way toward the light.

            I came out onto the sidewalk, crossed the street with a party of punk rockers, and moments later, ducked into the door of our lodgings. They had some bizarre money-saving arrangement with the light switch where you had to turn on the hall light and then run like hell up the stairs before it switched off and left you stranded in the dark.

I ran like hell. 

Part of this story was inspired by a tale of my father's, said to be true.  He was somewhere long ago in Texas and had stopped into a cafe and ordered a steak.  When he came out of the men's room, he glanced into the kitchen.  There, indeed sat the cook paring his toenails with a kitchen knife.  A cat jumped on the counter and the cook picked up a steak (my dad's steak?) and slapped the cat with it.  My father said he walked through the hallway, out the door and just kept walking.  A good story has "legs."   Writers love good stories.  Kreuzberg used to be a kind of East Village place in the old days but I hear it has become rather upscale.  It sure as hell wasn't when Emma was there. 

Incident at Stanley Market: The Shadow Warriors

Stanley Market Hong Kong

Our driver promised to pick us up in thirty minutes. I bought a frozen coconut bar from a vendor's cart, and looked around while I slurped it down. The market was a bazaar, just a warren of alleyways filled with booths all jammed with cheap-looking junk: sneakers, T-shirts, kimonos, lime green warm up-suits and gewgaws of international bad taste.  

             I lost Roger and Franz when they wandered into a shop selling tennis clothes, and I went on to paw through some hideous lingerie. Waste of time. When I beat it back to the tennis store, they were gone. It was definitely time for a fur fix, and I made friends with a calico cat lying between two big wicker baskets in a food stall.   

            Wandering through the market,  I killed time by taking photographs and watching people. Otherwise, I wouldn't have even noticed the two men in the shoe stall. My god, they were the same pair Peter and I had seen on the Singapore bus and then at Sentosa beach! The older, dark-eyed one was talking to his sidekick, who was examining the sneakers with so much concentration I expected him to whip out tags saying, “inspected by number 12,” and stick them onto the shoes. Dark Eyes spoke a mile a minute in a language I didn’t recognize. Then he stopped talking, and cast a quick glance all around the booth. Those hard eyes and that face with a permanent five o'clock shadow gave me the creeps, so much so that I ducked out of sight. I peered around the corner at them again. One inspecting, one gabbing, just like before. 

I aimed my little Olympus at them, pushed the zoom button, and snapped their picture, which was really stupid in retrospect, because I hadn’t calculated that the dim light in the recess of  stall would activate the camera's flash. A few people looked up, and then returned to their shopping. No such luck with this pair. For an instant they both froze, and then Dark Eyes glared at me. His mouth was all twisted, and before I could react, he charged around the corner of the display table toward me. His buddy hadn’t moved.

            The strap around my neck saved the camera from crashing to the ground, as he grabbed my arm.

            "What are you doing? What is the idea of taking my photograph?” He had a rough foreign voice, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the little polo player on his blue shirt.

             I said something really snappy, like,  "Not you. I'm...I’m taking pictures of everything. "   

            "I will have your film,” he said under his breath.

            I said, "Leave me alone." My heart pounded and I just wanted to get out of there.

            A Chinese man came up and asked, "Is there problem?"

            Dark Eyes dropped my arm and backed off. 

            "I was just taking some photographs of the market. Is that all right?"

I didn’t know if he understood me or not. He said, "If problem, I call police."

Dark Eyes said "No problem.” His companion stood and stared at us along with the other customers. The Chinese man strode behind the counter. He must have been the proprietor, and he obviously wanted us to leave.

            Like in a movie, I took off doing a panicky dodge through the maze of shops. I found the hideous lingerie shop again, grabbed a nightgown and charged into a dressing room about the size of a toilet stall. I cowered in there for what seemed like a long time. When I peered through the curtain, I didn’t see them. Again, just like in a chase scene, I heard some indignant shouts in Chinese as I hustled through the storeroom and out the back door.