By Melissa Knox

Ten years ago, right before Jules and I split up, we were hiking in Berchtesgaden. The sun blazed down on a July day so lovely that we sighed at the sight of the turquoise-blue lakes. The steady ripping sound of cows munching their way through the grass up the Watzmann, the biggest Alp, accompanied us. When I thought of the cement-and-graffiti building in which we taught in a gray, depressed Jersey City, streets littered with crack vials, I wanted never to return.

Jules took my hand. “Do we have to go back?” he asked. To our right, the higher peaks of the Watzmann boasted snowy tips, while Alpine flowers in purples and yellows dotted the landscape.

“Can’t complain!” he said. We sighed with deep contentment.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Didn’t we specify cowbells? Not one of those cows is sporting one.”

“Damn! I want a refund.” He put his arm around me, pulling me closer, and we turned our faces toward each other, ready to kiss.

“Ze bells, zey meck bad ears,” said a breathy, girlish voice behind me. Jules and I turned to see a tall, blonde in Tracht, boobs spilling out of her tightly laced blue dirndl.

What was it with these damn dirndls? I’d been all over Munich looking for one, and they were always too big in the bust. Did all German-speaking women wear D-cups? Was it the Alpine milk, or the beer?

“Bad…ears?” said Jules. He was staring. Not at her ears.

“Cows. We use in Chermany no bells. Die Schweizer, zey make zeese cowbells.” She scowled, somehow looking even prettier. “We know is bad for cows,” she added.

“I never knew that,” said Jules. He dropped my hand. I thought about reaching for his, and then looked at the girl. Some electricity swooped between the two of them.

~

Although I’ve sometimes wondered what might have happened if Jules and I had stopped for drinks at the Hotel zum Türken and then taken one of those tours of Hitler’s bunker, instead of strolling the lower reaches of the highest mountain, I do now ask myself what I was thinking dating a man twenty years younger than me who unexpectedly told me he was madly in love a few weeks before we made those fateful vacation plans. He’d always been a pal and a colleague; we’d gone out in groups for what passed as beer in New Jersey—now that I’d tried an Austrian stout I’d never go back.

As I looked at the two of them gazing open-mouthed and rather shyly at each other, as I started back down the mountain by myself, I realized I’d never go back in so many ways. I swore off American beer and young men, and I’ve never regretted my choice.

The saunas of Austria—redolent of pine and arnica, and the masseurs who really knew how to give a girl a good time, remained in the back of my mind even as I avoided the country for years. Once home, I’d arranged my schedule so that I never ran into Jules, and eventually he left the college. I heard he’d married “some girl with an accent,” and a few years after that I heard he’d divorced. When I saw a package deal online for Berchtesgaden and Vienna, I thought I’d return to the part of the world I loved—the scenery, the beer, the hiking. I knew I’d never run into Jules and whatzerface—she’d married him for a green card. I felt a certain satisfaction at putting the Atlantic Ocean between him and me when I flew into Munich.

~

A day later I was hiking in one of those charming Dorfs—food is all but free, and they love Americans—whose only drawback is the plumbing. A party of beer-drinkers had preceded me into the bar and the toilets, and too late, I discovered only cardboard spools—no paper. But what should appear on the windowsill but a pile of women’s magazines. Desperate, I ripped out a page at random, only to be rewarded, by the time I’d seated myself in the cubicle, with a full-page photo of Griselda, or whatever her name was, the babe who’d stolen Jules, modelling the German equivalent of  the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. She’d clearly had plastic surgery—her boobs looked painfully large and seemed almost to levitate.

The caption was in English: “I don’t take shit!”

Yes, you do, I thought, smiling.