It's summer in the global north (which is winter in the global south), and for the month of August Literatur.Review is bringing them all together, publishing previously untranslated or unpublished stories from the north and south of our world.

Stefan Grosser is the owner of a small family business in the interior design sector. He has been working for over 30 years on a literary work in progress, the multi-thousand-page epic "homo sapiens. Report of a Shipwrecked Man", which consists of 9 individual volumes of all text genres and from which he repeatedly performs at symposia, readings and literary-musical events. The story published here for the first time is part of his epic.

In my case, it was the level crossing keeper. At a certain age, every child has a figure who dominates their nightmares, maybe the devil or an executioner. And the gatekeeper met all the criteria: I only ever saw him from a somewhat shadowy distance; he operated huge machines that terrified me; and he made one hell of a racket.
Twice a day, my mother and I had to cross the railway tracks in the car, mornings on the way to school and lunchtimes on the way back. And more often than not, almost always in fact, as I recall, a train would pass at exactly the same time. A jangling bell would signal the barriers closing behind a flashing red light, and every time my gaze would turn from this ominous scene up to the side window on the upper floor of the gatekeeper's hut, where behind a large window a man was turning a crank with incredible speed. You never saw him in full, which probably added to his menace; in the gloom behind the window, you only ever saw his broad shoulders and round, moon-shaped head, and a hint of his hand as it operated the crank like a machine. In this way, he closed the cumbersome barriers, and as soon as they were closed and the bell had stopped ringing, the gatekeeper would disappear somewhere into the depths of his little house, and then I would disappear too, huddling behind the driver's seat with my ears covered as tightly as possibly against the coming horror: With a noise deafening enough to shake the car, the train sped past, and though it was invisible to me from my safe hiding place in the back, I was so scared each time that it hurt and almost made me angry. But it was always over more quickly than I expected, and when the bells rang again, now sounding harmless, even comforting, and not threatening in the slightest, I would climb back into my seat, watch the barriers open and the red light stop flashing, and immediately look up at the gatekeeper, who was standing behind his big window, half-open as usual, cranking the handle and clearing the way for us again.
It was always the worst time of the day, worse than sport or religion. Eventually, it got too much for me and I would kick up a fuss every morning outside the garage and every lunchtime leaving school. I didn't want ever to have to cross the tracks again; the noise of the train rushing past was just too much, and it was all the fault of the gatekeeper, who hated me and tortured me on purpose. My mother had to drag me to the car by force every morning and lunchtime, and when a train passed at the level crossing, I howled and screamed at the top of my lungs until the barriers opened with the reassuring tinkling of the bell. I don't remember how old I was at the time, and I don't know to what extent my panic was real or just an act, or even whether it was perhaps only directed at the gatekeeper and his level crossing as a substitute for something else entirely, whether consciously or unconsciously. Be that as it may, things reached a head when one morning I refused to get up, struggling wildly when my mother tried to get me out of bed. I think I was having the same dream almost every night at that point - the gatekeeper was closing the gates, then I would realise that our car was on the tracks and that the train was going to run into us with its terrible noise. I tried to get out of the trapped car, but - of course - the rear doors were locked and my mother would order me to fasten my seatbelt, as the train thundered down on us, nearer and nearer. Of course, I would wake up just before impact, calling out in terror to my mother in the middle of the night. I would probably tell her about the dream, and in the morning I'd be kicking and screaming in my bed that the gate keeper was going to let the train hit us.
My mother was an intelligent woman who always approached problems head on, which sometimes led to unconventional solutions. Not for her the simple idea of avoiding the jinxed level crossing by means of a little detour, which would have cost her maybe five minutes each way; no, she knew that wouldn't help, and came up with a far more ingenious plan: At the weekend she took me for a walk through our neighbourhood. It was a beautiful autumn day with a deep golden light and the scent of leaves - we didn't head for the nearby green spaces by the Würm, where we would often go for some fresh air, but instead towards the level crossing, or rather, right to the gatekeeper's hut. As we got close, she took my hand so that I couldn't run away, but strangely, I didn't want to run away at all. I wasn't afraid, it seemed perfectly natural to me that we were now going to the gatekeeper's hut. My mother (as I recall) rang the doorbell on the metal door with frosted glass, and a few seconds later the gatekeeper himself actually opened it. Today I know the story behind this: my mother had - as she confessed to me many years later - called on the gatekeeper in his little house several days earlier, told him about her problem and asked whether he could put an end to my nightmares by being kind to me and explaining his job, showing me that there was really nothing monstrous about a gatekeeper and a level crossing. I can't remember exactly how I felt at the time, climbing the narrow, steep staircase between the gatekeeper and my mother and finally reaching the room above the tracks where I had always watched him from the car as he cranked the lever; the memory of it is a bit surreal as if wrapped in cotton wool. All I know is that the room, which had always seemed dark and gloomy from the car window, was actually really bright, almost flooded with light - the window ran along three sides of the room, giving a panoramic 180 degree view of the tracks, which ran straight ahead of us. In front of the windows, on a long console that also stretched around the perimeter, was the control centre; green, yellow and red lights, telephone receivers, levers and buttons, which the gatekeeper gently but firmly told me not to touch. Somewhere here, of course, I also discovered the dreaded crank, a black arm with a silver handle, attached almost at eyelevel to the panelling of the console. This I was given permission to touch, but I wasn't strong enough to move it even a single centimetre.
I have to say that my mother's plan worked perfectly. Since that miraculous visit, my nightmares about the gatekeeper and his cursed level crossing disappeared. And not only that: I no longer minded when our car had to stop at the clanging barriers - the noise of a train rushing past no longer frightened or hurt me, something I still wonder about today. I no longer had to crawl behind the driver's seat and cover my ears; I could look the approaching train in the eye and almost take pleasure in its roar. And every time the barriers opened or closed, I would look out of the car window at the gatekeeper and wave, and he would wave back with his free hand as he turned the crank. For a long time afterwards, I visited him regularly on my own - two or three times a week after homework and sometimes even on Saturdays and Sundays. If I remember correctly, I came of my own volition, and although I hadn't initially been invited on that first visit with my mother, he was always very nice to me and explained step by step the rules of train traffic to me. Unfortunately, the individual visits have blurred together apart in my mind's eye, merging into one eternally long visit lasting almost my entire childhood. I  would usually stay - as my mother still told me years later in front of her friends - from homework until dinner time and even whole afternoons at weekends, in that hut, and the gatekeeper, whose burly shape with the round moonlike head used to loom large in my worst nightmares, would explain the function of the green, yellow and red lights, the levers and the buttons and tried to teach me which signals were used to indicate that the train was coming. In the past, when I had only known the level crossing from ground level, this had been the worst moment, but now that I had this panoramic view of the tracks, I would wait eagerly for the train: standing on a chair in front of the long window, I would look out over the control centre along the two tracks that passed below me and - endlessly straight - disappeared in both directions in a tiny, flickering silver vanishing point. Next to me, the gatekeeper worked hard at his levers and buttons, watching the lights flash on and off and answering telephones and other signals. Finally, he would stand in front of his crank, grip the handle with his right hand and point with his left index finger in the direction from which the train was about to come. At first I thought I could only see a slight flicker, then I saw that somewhere on the embankment a light on one or two signal masts changed from yellow to green, red to green or yellow to red, and suddenly in the distance, the snout of a train would become visible, as small as a toy locomotive. That was the cue for the gatekeeper to begin his cranking of the lever. I would hear the jangling bell, quieter than it had sounded from the car, and see that one or two cars were stopping in front of the slowly lowering barriers. By now the train no longer seemed so harmless, you could make out the whole locomotive and behind it the long line of carriages; it seemed to be growing, getting faster and there was a very high-pitched whirring sound, like an electric current, coming from the rails or the high-voltage cables. Then everything happened terribly fast: I saw the huge locomotive, a furious monster, shooting straight towards me, it seemed to distort for a moment under its speed, and with a roar that seemed much louder than the terrible noise I used to hear from the car, the train raced past my nose. Between my face and the shadowy heads of the passengers in the carriages, a colourful cloud of autumn leaves rose up explosively and swirled against the glass pane of the window, which rattled ominously under the onslaught. The train had passed, and as the gatekeeper turned his crank again as if in a panic and the barriers at the level crossing rose, I looked after the last carriage, which glided away in a dense whirl of leaves on the merging tracks and finally seemed to dissolve in the shimmering silver vanishing point.
These minutes, in which I stood on the chair waiting for the train, watching it approach, speed past and glide away, were so important to me. Every time I got down from my chair, I felt like I was experiencing something for the very first time. My walk from home to the level crossing through the streets of our neighbourhood, past the fences, the hedges and the garage doors of the single-family homes, was filled with expectation and anticipation, the way back later with reflection and a sense of great calm.
I've already told you: It was autumn back then when my mother brought me face to face with the gatekeeper himself, the real one. The only two visits to him that I can remember individually, apart from the very first one, were at the end of that autumn, after the first late snowfall. It must actually have been in December, a few weeks or even just a few days before Christmas, at a time when children tend to get over- excited anyway. I may have thrown snowballs at the gatekeeper when he appeared at the door, but if that was the case, it didn't bother him - he was as good-natured as a bear. Anyway, I remember standing on my chair in front of the window that day and barely recognising the train approaching from the distance, as it was covered in a cloud of snow. From where I was, it looked like a foggy searchlight was coming towards us. It was only when the train was quite close that we could make out the locomotive - the carriages remained completely obscured -  and as the train thundered past the window, for a few seconds our control centre was plunged into a thick white fog; it was like going through clouds in a aeroplane or being buried by an avalanche. When we emerged again, I saw the train drifting away on the white tracks, but all I could make out were two increasingly indistinct red lights in the middle of the swirling snow, which the last carriage was dragging behind it like a veil. When the gatekeeper had finished cranking and saw my face, flushed with excitement, he said: "That was the Trans-Siberian Railway!" - I must have looked completely blank or asked him what he meant as he went on to explain to me that the Trans-Siberian Railway was the longest railway line in the world, that it crossed the entire continent and directly connected one ocean with the other, and as it ran through the north of the continent, through Siberia, it was called the Trans-Siberian Railway and always had to travel through deep snow. And on my next visit, I think it was the following day, the gatekeeper had a large map of the world with him, which he spread out on a wooden table next to the staircase.
"The Trans-Siberian Railway runs from here to here," he claimed, pointing with his left index finger to Brest, a coastal town in Brittany on a peninsula jutting far out into the Atlantic, and with his right index finger to Vladivostok.
"And we are here," he then said, pointing to a spot quite close to Brest. You could get on a train in Menzing (that was our district) and get off again much later in Vladivostok.
"Is that far?" I asked him.
"Oh my word, yes, that's very far, terribly far!" he said and took a ruler out of a drawer under the table top. Using the scale on the map, he estimated the distance between Menzing and Vladivostok.
"Here is Menzing," he then said (I can see the world map with the gatekeeper's thick fingers in front of me as if it were only a few days ago), "and here is Vladivostok: eleven thousand five hundred kilometres east of Menzing."

Children can be cruel, they have no concept of other peoples' feelings. That very winter, possibly just a few weeks after discovering the Trans-Siberian Railway, I lost interest in the gatekeeper and his level crossing. As if by prior arrangement, I simply stopped going, and when my mother and I had to stop at the level crossing, I didn't even look up at the gatekeeper - it was as if I had never known him. The level crossing, the barriers and the train no longer had any meaning for me, they neither frightened me nor fascinated me, they were now for me simply what they had always been for my mother: an obstacle on the way to school and back.
Sometimes, when I happened to catch sight of the top floor of the gatekeeper's hut, I would see him up there behind the window, waving at me, almost frantically, waving and beckoning to me, probably making signs to me, telling me to come up again. It always made me uncomfotable and I would quickly turn away. I didn't really understand what he actually wanted; I found the whole thing confusing and off-putting. Within just days of stopping my visits to him, the gatekeeper belonged to my past and I could hardly remember what had once connected me to him.  More than half a century later, the gate keeper is still with me to this day, and I feel as if I can see him standing in his little hut at every level crossing I pass, with those broad shoulders and big round face, cranking his handle and waving at me desperately,   longingly.
I never visited the gatekeeper again. I don't know whether he stopped waving at some point, I almost assume he did, but I'm not sure, because one day I forgot about him for good. I was no longer aware of his existence, I no longer thought about the person behind the seemingly automatically functioning barriers. It was only years later, when I had long since stopped letting my mother take me to school and back, and instead cycled to and from school on my own, that I was once again reminded of the gatekeeper in a rather shocking way: I was sitting in my room one afternoon doing my homework and suddenly heard a terrible noise, a bang as if from an explosion and a horrible screeching, shortly followed by police sirens, ambulances and fire engines. After work that evening, my parents told me what had happened: the barriers at the level crossing hadn't closed and a car, in which a mother and her two children were travelling, had been hit by the train and dragged along for several hundred meters. The train had not derailed, but the mother and children were dead. The next morning, as I was crossing the tracks on my bike, I looked for traces of the accident, but in my haste I couldn't find anything. Over the following days, I learned that the gatekeeper was held responsible for the accident - he had ignored signals and failed to react to the approaching train. He was removed from his post and replaced by someone else, but soon after, a citizens' initiative was formed in Menzing, which protested angrily against the inactivity of the Bundesbahn and demanded that an automatic barrier be installed, as at other level crossings. The Bundesbahn gave in, and a few months later the barriers at our crossing became completely automated.
I remember that my gatekeeper was charged with negligent homicide, after pressure from the citizens' initiative; I never got to see the outcome of the case or what became of the old man. A few years later, one of Menzing's busy roads was converted into a multi-lane arterial road, taking all traffic under the railway tracks, just a few hundred meters from the old level crossing. The level crossing was closed, the road leading over the tracks was turned into a cul-de-sac on both sides, the gatekeeper's house was torn down, and trees and bushes were planted on the embankment where the barriers used to rise and fall, clearing and blocking the way. From then on, my journeys to and from school took a little longer; I had to pedal on a cycle path through the new underpass, and when I finally passed my driving test on my eighteenth birthday and was given my first car by my parents, not the slightest trace remained of the level crossing that used to appear in my worst nightmares.