A DISPATCH FROM THE UNDERWORLD
By Randi Hoffman
While my daughter was home from Berlin visiting us for the holidays, she visited her doctor and had a three-month supply of her anti-depressant medication shipped to our apartment. It was scheduled to arrive in the mail while she was still home visiting, before she returned overseas. But it became delayed in the chaos of the mail, so she asked me to send it to her in Germany when it finally arrived.
I had a hunch, so I researched online and discovered that it’s illegal to ship prescription medication to Germany. I’m sure the German officials are really trying to target opioids and more dangerous drugs, but it’s still against the law. I began to recall Facebook videos of drug sniffing dogs in airports and pictured the package moving down a conveyer belt, with loud alarms sounding as it hit the x-ray machine. In the videos people proclaim their innocence, but are still hauled off to detention in handcuffs. The more likely result in our case would be confiscating the package, and/or fining us. Still, the German government has been particular about visas and housing, and has many specific rules for non-citizens.
My husband urged me not to break the law.
“Micah’s mother does this all the time,” my daughter told me. “You’re being paranoid,”
When I next saw her partner Micah, I asked him how his mother manages this. “I haven’t gotten it together to get my prescriptions filled,” he confessed. “But it’s just like, you tell the post office you’re sending socks, and you put in a few pairs of socks.”
Another hurdle I hadn’t anticipated was the Byzantine-ness of mailing addresses in Germany. Or rather, the difficulty of obtaining a mailing address when you are not a citizen, especially in the age when so many things can be sent electronically. It seems that landlords are reluctant to put renter’s names on mailboxes, and the mail carriers won’t put the mail in a box without the recipient’s name on it. It’s complicated there to receive mail. My daughter finally decided I should send the package to her friend Ian.
I had met Ian when we were visiting our daughter in Berlin. He is Swedish, small, with very short dark hair. He doesn’t look like a typical Scandinavian. He came up to me at an art event and introduced himself. I said, “Hi!” and then we looked at each other for a while not knowing what to say. We’re both introverts.
When the prescription was finally delivered, I packed it in a brown envelope, the size I use for mailing books. I had ordered a box of gourmet hot chocolate in individual packets I thought my daughter would enjoy for a Hannukah present. Germany is cold, usually colder than New York. I had to order these online, as I didn’t want to go from store to store trying to find this product. Once again, the shipping was for some reason delayed, and the hot chocolate arrived too late for the holidays.
This was a chance to put it to good use. The nestled the bottle of pills among the different flavored packets I had ordered: Artic White Chocolate, Raspberry, Amaretto. I took the package to the post office, and wrote “Hot Chocolate” on the customs form. I was hoping the clerk wouldn’t shake the package.
But the woman behind the counter was disinterested, threw the package into a large bin, and didn’t even look at the form.
I was able to track the package as it went through Frankfurt, and finally to Berlin. Then Ian was staying at his boyfriend’s for a few days when the package was delivered, before my daughter and her friend sorted it out. Finally, I received a WhatsApp message, “THE DRUGS ARE IN MY POSSESSION!!! And the hot chocolate is amazing. A perfect cover-up!”
Randi Hoffman lives in the East Village of New York City and has published nonfiction in the anthologies Places Like Home,The Zen of Mothering, Un Bordado de Voces; andAfter the Clouds the Sun She has written art and book reviews for The Women’s Review of Books A Gathering of the Tribes, and Downtown magazine. She teaches English at Hudson County Community College in Jersey City.
