Unnatural Order. Liz Porter

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      ‘Do you know him?’ Karl stared past her at the driver.

      ‘No, he was just being friendly.’ Caroline looked back at the little green car. People who drove those cars always seemed friendly. Hitchhiking in Germany as a student, she had stood in the rain as Mercedes after Mercedes zoomed past, each with one or two people in it. Then a little red Deux Chevaux had come into view, loaded with three people, bags and a lone ski sticking out of the sunroof. It had stopped.

      The rock music broke off. ‘Achtung! Achtung,’ barked the radio. ‘Autobahn Dreieck Stuttgart/Degerloch. Wegen Unfall, vier Kilometer Stau.’

      ‘What on earth was that?’ Caroline gasped.

      ‘What?’ said Karl mildly.

      ‘The military announcement. The “Achtung, Achtung”. I’ve only ever heard that in films about prisoner-of-war camps.’

      He laughed. ‘That was the traffic report. The radio is programmed so that the reports will break into whatever is on.’ He grinned. ‘German efficiency. That one just said that near the Stuttgart/Degerloch turnoff there’s a four-kilometre traffic jam – Stau. You know what wegen Unfall means?’

      ‘Because of an accident, Herr Professor,’ replied Caroline.

      ‘Sehr gut,’ said Karl. ‘How about coffee? I need to get petrol anyway, so we can take a break.’

      Minutes later, they pulled into a vast car park and made their way towards a two-storey, factory-like building with a huge sign proclaiming it to be a restaurant. Leaving Caroline at the ladies’, Karl walked upstairs to get a table in the cafe.

      The four toilet cubicles in the small washroom had coin-operated locks. All were either locked or occupied. ‘Insert three ten-pfennig pieces here’ said a small sign next to each lock. Caroline groaned. She had no German coins and she wasn’t about to rush out and find Karl to get some. She heard a toilet flush in one cubicle and stood outside it. Surely her predecessor would hold the door open for her. In the few toilets like this she had encountered in Australia or England, women of all ages and social classes co-operated to thwart the system.

      When a neat-looking woman in a long black raincoat emerged from a cubicle, Caroline stepped forward and placed her hand on the door, to stop it slamming.

      ‘Entschuldigen Sie, bitte,’ the woman said stiffly, grabbing the handle and banging the door shut.

      Caroline glared at her and moved to stand in front of the next door. When it opened she was ready. ‘Entschuldigen Sie, ich habe kein Geld,’ she said crisply, her hand on the left-hand side of the door, ready to push it open if necessary.

      This time she had better luck. The woman leaving, an elfin figure with cropped black hair and postbox red lips, smiled vaguely as she abandoned the door to Caroline. She turned to a leather-jacketed girl who was combing her hair at the mirror and started talking to her in rapid French.

      Upstairs in the cafe Karl was sprawled at a table, apparently deep in conversation with a large blond biker and his female companion, both in immaculate black leather bodysuits with slashes of red and blue let in at the elbows and knees.

      Caroline thought of pasty, unhealthy London, where everyone looked either thin and pale or white and walrus-like. Here, everyone in the room seemed to be over-sized and bursting with robust health.

      Karl and the male bodysuit were engaged in a typically tedious tourists’ conversation about whether France was expensive or not. Caroline sipped the bitter coffee and tried to tune into the conversation, which had moved on to India.

      The male biker, broad-shouldered with a wide red face, narrow blue eyes and a furry blond moustache, was doing most of the talking while his female companion, a delicate-looking woman with her blond hair in a thick plait, muttered phrases that seemed to indicate agreement. The one virtue of the man’s conversation, from her point of view, was that he spoke slowly, so she could understand almost every word he said.

      Ten minutes into his monologue about India and the wily ways of its inhabitants, she was no longer sure whether her ability to comprehend was an advantage.

      ‘When you’re taking a bus,’ the man droned on, ‘never let anyone take your luggage and put it up on the roof for you. The first time, I let this man help and I said thank you, and then he wanted money. So then I knew. You have to do things yourself or you’ll always get ripped off.’

      Caroline was horrified to see Karl nodding in what looked like agreement.

      ‘Aber das ist.’ She looked at Karl. ‘How do I say ridiculous?’

      ‘You can say it in English,’ the biker said.

      Caroline took a deep breath. How she hated bloody cheapskate backpacker travellers. At least the despised busloads of American tourists displayed humility about their own ignorance of foreign countries. Travellers like him always knew everything. Whatever you had experienced, they had found it cheaper, better and more authentically in the next village, in the restaurant down the road, or in the same place last year before it was ruined by the dreaded tourists.

      ‘The man who helped you with the luggage,’ she said carefully. ‘That would be his job. He would feed himself, his wife and children, with the few rupees he gets from all the people he helps. That’s India. Too many people, and all of them doing little jobs so they can survive. Backpacker tourists like you are so obsessed with getting the best deal on everything that you don’t stop to notice that the other Indians pay that man to help with their bags. Because they understand the system. And they have far less money than you. Tourists like you expect to be welcomed into someone else’s culture, but always at a bargain price. You think only of what you can take. You bring nothing.’

      ‘But tourists like me bring in money to those people,’ the biker said. ‘I just want to pay a fair price for things.’

      Caroline shook her head.

      ‘You can’t go to India with a German mentality. You have to understand their system, try and do things their way.’

      ‘So you would pay everybody who asks you for money!’ The man’s contemptuous bray revealed a set of shiny white teeth.

      ‘Not if she was with me,’ chuckled Karl.

      Caroline glared at him but felt too dispirited by the interchange to continue it. She was only going to spend a week with him before going back to London. They didn’t have to agree on everything.

      Both bikers got to their feet.

      ‘It’s time we moved on,’ said the man, extending a hand to Karl.

      ‘Tschuss.’

      ‘Tschuss,’ replied Karl.

      ‘Tschuss,’ echoed Caroline.

      ‘And now?’ Karl turned to Caroline. ‘Shall we go too? It’s another two hours’ drive to Gellingen.’

      Caroline woke as they slowed and turned off the autobahn. Suddenly she was in a semi-rural landscape. An open vista of green and yellow fields gave way to a narrow winding road with steeply terraced vineyards on either side.

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