Frankly … social  The matchstick woman

Maximilian Buddenbohm watches a woman on the underground. She’s behaving strangely, yet her appearance is oddly familiar.

I head down to the underground. A young woman sits alone on a bench in the station, she might be 17 or already in her late twenties, it’s hard to tell. She looks awful, suffering, wretched, with skin that seems oddly rancid, unwashed hair and unkempt clothing. She must surely be a drug addict, of which there are many at this station and nearby. She looks as though she’s about to cry. She covers her face with her hands and removes them again, her expression still tearless. And this look then remains unchanged throughout the entire text that follows, a silent film character frozen in the advanced stages of despair, her eyes wide open. No other facial expression, just this one face, it looks like a mask, a mask she wears all day long, portraying an ongoing state of horror. The woman keeps looking frantically around her, as though she’s being followed, again and again she looks left and right, along the platform. Suddenly she doubles up sharply, her hands shielding her tummy, where she might have pain, cramps, burning. She brings her elbows together in front of her stomach and splays her fingers, surely these are gestures of need. Her head abruptly kinks downwards, at a grotesque-looking angle, then her entire torso bends forwards, awkwardly and quickly, she’s a matchstick woman with rubber-band joints, twisted forcefully and roughly by a higher power.

Aimless

She hurriedly boards the next train with me, entering the carriage in a cowering posture. She sits beside me briefly, biting her nails and trembling slightly, an indescribable horror in her eyes, with which she barely seems to see anything, certainly not me at any rate.

She has emaciated arms, her whole stature is far too thin, too frail. She can’t sit still. Then she changes seats, without seeing anything or noticing other people in the carriage, the scrawny creature moves aimlessly from seat to seat. The woman seems to be carried through the compartment on the wind, and then there’s this sudden bending and jerking and kinking of her torso and neck, creating extraordinary angles, she’s an animated Kafka drawing. Her suffering can be seen as clear as day, but her misery is worn only on her face, she doesn’t emit a sound, not the entire time. The other passengers glance briefly at her, shake their heads and carry on scrolling on their phones. The woman isn’t begging, so there’s no contact with her. People are just looking at her in passing, she’s one of many, a side effect of public transport slightly less annoying than a ticket inspection.

An urban image

She scurries out at the second stop, with a certain randomness, she gets out any old where, doesn’t even check the station name, and then I spot her getting straight back on three doors further down, onto the same train she’s just left. The way she carefully sits back down, hunches forward, hurriedly changes seat as though she was following strict instructions, she appears driven, hunted, hounded. She sits down, she stands up, she hurries on, she sits down. And so it goes on, from row to row, at some point finally I can’t see her anymore. Her stooped figure flees the picture I’m trying to describe to you.

Nothing else happens. There is no further incident, no twist in the tale, and no punchline either. I’m only writing it down because I see it all the time, and maybe you don’t. After all, it’s more of an urban image, I muse, a typical megacity scenario is what it is, and perhaps you have completely different pictures where you live. But that’s what it’s like here, and it’s been getting far worse for some time. Years ago, back in the day at some point, things were starting to get better, the drug scene was a far less visible feature of our cityscape for a while, but that’s a long time ago now and things have been spiralling unequivocally downwards in recent years.

Measures

Later on the day of this scene, an expert on television says that the covid years had been like petrol on the fire of misery. What the report meant was the misery you see at the train station in this city, the drug scene, the alcohol scene, and also all the victims of homelessness for whatever reason.

The city is planning measures. That’s something you often read in the media lately, they’re always planning some measures or other, and the politicians responsible look seriously into the cameras and sound well-prepared as they declare their objectives. Immediately afterwards, others say why these measures are wrong and all the things they would do better if they got elected. But people in social professions, including for instance the organisers of aid facilities at the station, they agree unanimously that all the measures are more geared towards pushing the problem away rather than offering useful support. The planned measures are mainly to help those who no longer wish to see all that misery, they say.

At the methadone handout point, not far from where I live, they’ve just significantly increased the height of fences alongside the forecourt. That’s also a municipal measure, I assume. They are the fences against the many train tracks leading to the main railway station, the tracks onto which people would have otherwise been easily able to fall, with more or less intention.

Sometimes people like the young woman from the underground I saw this morning stand at these fences. They stand there, their hands clutching the mesh, they just stand there and wait and wait, and then they carry on again, heading somewhere that presumably won’t be any better. I see it every day. I see it and I don’t see it, it’s the daily routine in my neighbourhood. We walk past people in a state of misery, and people in a state of misery walk past us.

Sometimes you look at them, sometimes you don’t.
 

August 2023