Oberpfalz, Kreis Waldmünchen 9.6.1998: Newfound Cousins and Rowanberry Schnapps

In the Bavarian Oberpfalz now, staying in a little village, Stein, near where Steve’s Schindler ancestors appear to have lived, Katzelsried. We drove here yesterday morning, passing around Regensburg.

The countryside here is very pleasant—rolling hills, fields of wheat, rye, barley, little villages with churches, houses surrounded by apple, cherry, and pear trees, and gardens with pansies, peonies, pink and white lupines, and even, here at our Gasthaus, a sumac tree. Outside the window of our room is a beautiful espaliered pear tree.

When we drove through Hiltersried yesterday, the village just south of Katzelsried, we saw a house painted with a fresco, and beneath it, Schindler. Steve stopped, and the woman invited us back. She recommended Gasthaus Braun in Stein, so we came here, checked in, and then drove around the countryside to see Katzelsried, Irlach, and Tiefenbach, all places associated with the Bavarian migration to Dyersville, Iowa.

The church in Tiefenbach was pretty, 18th-century Baroque, full of light and with newly gilded statues and paintings. There’s a proprietorial familiarity about these Bavarian churches, as if people have made them—and their saints and icons—their own. The Tiefenbach church had bouquets of flowers tied to the end of each pew, adding to the gaiety.

In the afternoon, we returned to the guesthouse, where Herr Braun had invited his cousin, a Herr Georg Ederer, to talk to Steve. He’s apparently a noted local historian and genealogist. He was a very nice man, and was delighted to find on the list of Bavarians who took the ship Charlemagne to America in November 1845 one of his own relatives about whom he had only partial information. Today he’ll meet with us in Waldmünchen to show Steve microfilm copies of the church books.

In the evening, we went to Hiltersried to meet Herr Schindler. He showed Steve the family records his mother had compiled, going back to an Urvater Adam Schindler born in 1807. Steve believes this is the brother of his Georg Schindler, born 1809.

We sat and talked with Herr Schindler and his brother into the night, drinking a glass of homemade schnapps from Austria, made with something called Vogelbeeren. Afterwards, he showed us his workshop, where he gilds statues, including a crucifix to be used on Thursday in Tiefenbach’s Corpus Christi procession.

Oberpfalz, Kreis Waldmünchen 27.12.99: Duck and Dumplings and Dreams of Home

Preparing to drive back to Braunschweig this morning. Past several days snowy and rainy, with ice on Christmas day, when Steve, Hermann, and I drove to Regensburg to spend several hours with his son Reinhard. A walk around the Altstadt in the ice and snow, the cobblestones making the walk dangerous, since they accumulate glaze ice (Glateis) quickly.

Glateis: glaze ice—do the English inherit the term from the Germans, or vice versa? In Germany, I seem to keep meeting some Urquelle of my own imagination. Though German seems more specific in the way it names concrete reality—a language made for ordering and managing the world?

+ + + + +

A German housewife can work busily all morning in the kitchen with a duck, potatoes, salad ingredients, banging pots and pans with great intensity, and when she’s finished, will have produced merely a duck, some potatoes, and a salad. It’s a culture that seems curiously tone-deaf when it comes to the possibilities of food. The duck is considered good if it’s well-roasted, not well-seasoned. And the potatoes vary only to the extent that they take different forms, from parslied, fried, to Knödels. None of these presentations takes away their essential potatoness.

We ate Ente and Knödels on Christmas day at the Alte Linde beside the Donau and the Steinerbrücke. We ate Ente and Knödels at the Ederers on Stephen’s day. For supper on Stephen’s day, we had Ente and Knödels at the S.’s.

+ + + + +

Leave-taking: Marcel Proust was right, Partir, c’est mourir un peu. The birds slowly circling the snowy fields remind me of the ducks over the rice stubble as we drove back and forth to Arkansas in that awful winter my mother came back from Sri Lanka.

Somehow, the past days, the experience of being in Germany this winter melds with the experience of taking care of (taking leave of?) my mother. I haven’t yet fully believed that all this happened, her decline, the move back to Arkansas, the nursing home. Like so much in my life, this sequence of events has no name. It’s just there, in memory and experience, beyond any language I’ve learned to speak.

I know that this experience is melded with being in Germany because of my dreams. Ever since the day or so before Christmas, I’ve had recurring dreams of home, unsettling ones. Home follows us like the whipped cur wherever we go.

Oberpfalz, Kreis Waldmünchen 25.12.99: Playing Putti and Approaching Millennium

Millennium approaches . . . . Heinrich Böll, Missing Persons and Other Essays, trans. Leila Vennewitz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1994), “Missing Persons”:

"It is not the permanent I am after but the present that has become the past. Not what is told, not even what is true, and certainly not what is eternal. I want the present of those who belong to the past . . . . I want the one hair of the head that has fallen to the ground” (pp. 7-8).

+ + + + +

Those stories Aunt Kat used to tell us at night, when we were all snuggled into bed upstairs with her in my grandmother’s winter-cold attic bedroom: she’d carry them along and then suddenly, precipitously end them with a boom. The protagonist would die cruelly and unexpectedly; the beautiful maiden would, beyond all prediction, choose the frog and not the handsome prince.

I understand the temptation. In part, it’s the thrill of hearing the children who are hanging on one’s every word shriek with horror at the outrageous dénoument which precedes even the noument.

It’s also the irresistible attraction of the end. If the end is there, and is inevitable, then why not bring it onstage now, and save oneself the trouble of all the dé of the noument?

But was it also the authorial act of ownership? It was, after all, her story, and she could take it where she wished, or let the story take her where it would.

+ + + + +

Driving now to Regensburg. Still in the country lanes of the Oberpfalz. This is a landscape that is always pretty to the eye. “Pretty” is the appropriate word. The rolling hills and village churches tucked in their folds, the snow-covered fields, the mist-shrouded hilltops in the distance—these aren’t dramatically beautiful, but they are decidedly pretty. In summer, the hills smile, showing all their dimples; in winter, they fold their white mantles coyly over themselves and take their rest.

(God. Who wrote those sentences?)

Midnight Mass in an Oberpfälzer village: everyone walks. No one talks to anyone else. Regina sprints ahead and sits downstairs, presumably with the women; we sit upstairs, and I can’t see down.

The upstairs balcony is full of older men, all stocky and placid in the stifling and very rigid little pews—that is, they make one sit bolt upright, and the back of the pews catches one right across the upper back. In addition to the old men and the two foreigners are young couples smelling of the last cigarettes they hurriedly finished before coming into the church.

The Mass is theater, a code I can’t quite grasp. It begins with a literal theatrical performance, a play by a troupe of young folks. All’s in Bayerisch.

Then on to the liturgical theater. For the most part, we in the balcony watch. I have no choice; I know none of the responses and prayers in German, not even the Our Father. Why the others remain silent, I have no idea, since the code is unknown to me. I can only assume that, in this Catholicism still so caught in the Baroque moment of the Counter-Reformation, the point is to watch—to watch a sacred play unfold. The point’s to be there, to affirm one’s national (i.e., Bavarian) cultural identity.

Communion comes. Several old men stand to watch who goes to the communion table. Only 2 or 3 leave the balcony. Judging from our experience at Fronleichnam, and the paucity of communicants from the balcony, I assume that the numbers are very low.

All the while, the organ plays a jaunty little tune like the tune a game-show plays as the contestants deliberate over their replies. We’re up against the organ. Unconsciously, I’m tapping my feet to the sprightly little tune. Steve reaches over to stop me, whispering that I’m bouncing the whole pew.

Play seems to be a big concept in Baroque Catholicism. Light plays across the golden folds of the altar and statues; the putti play, sometimes naughtily, on the pillars above the altar. All is light, smiling, pretty—but to my untutored eye, with its inability to read the code—without depth. This is a deeply enculturated Catholicism, with (seemingly) little critical distance from the shortcomings of the culture it inhabits.

I wonder: is it the same in the Eifel? There, the old Romanesque and Gothic churches remain, not overbuilt with spun-sugar Rococo ornament, as in Bavaria. In the Eifel, I felt a darker, more mysterious spirit—along with poverty, backwardness, a sense of the cultural isolation that doesn’t seem to be present in Bavaria.

And over all these Catholic Christmas festivities the old pope presided, both metaphorically (since he wasn’t in Germany) and literally (since he presides over the system that very much affects life here).

We saw him on t.v. last night, live from the Vatican, draped in some kind of multicolored silken shawl that didn’t seem to be a liturgical garment, per se. His face was very unattractive, set, unsmiling, his hooded eyes peering out now and again in an almost demented, barely comprehending, way, as people from Asia and Polynesia and everywhere else brought gifts to him. They have been permitted no ecclesial voice under this papal regime. But they can be ornamental children at play before the unbending old man who sways the world in his multicolored shawl.

I don’t like this old man, and feel defensive about saying this. It seems very ungracious to take pot shots at a doddering, old, and very sick man.

But I haven’t disliked him only when he became old. I’ve disliked him all along. He reminds me of a Renaissance pope in his single-minded determination to rule. And if we can now look back and decry the abuses of power of those popes, why not of this one?

This man has hurt very many people, in his determination to safeguard a system of ecclesiastical power, a culturally determined and mutable way of organizing and administering the church. And he has seemed not to care. He has not grown old gracefully, because he has not been gracious—full of grace—to people in his lifetime.

At his death, and it will be soon, he’ll be lionized—and lionized by all the worst people in the world. He has defended male power and privilege; he has given the appearance of defending the grossest capitalists possible. The royalty of Europe traipsed before him last night, celebrating the sole institution left in the world that takes their titles for granted as more than mere words.

Oberpfalz, Kreis Waldmünchen 24.12.99: Circling Crows and Fir-Clad Hills

Heilige Abend. In today’s local paper, Bayerwald-Echo from Cham, I read in the personals column an ad from a woman, “Ich will keine Schokolade; ich will ein Mann.” This in bold letters. The ad goes on to say that the man should enjoy old movies and should be nice and optimistic. Well, yes. Who doesn’t need such a man? Heilige Abend . . . .

I must be wrong about white as the interior color in north Germany. Here, too: every room in this house is painted white. Most are also stippled or stuccoed. Upstairs, there’s a kind of faux stucco wallpaper, unobtrusively plastic, with little designs—leaves, etc.—of pale gray and brown. Germans like things cool, understated, “natural” in a very well-defined and entirely artificial sense.

And what a house this is, in a village the backside of nowhere. Steve’s doing the ironing now in the Badezimmer, the main bathroom for the house, downstairs. Hermann built it, as he did, I suppose, everything in the house. It’s so cool, beautiful, well-appointed, with white tiles (again, rippled) interspersed with plane tan ones with Egyptian motifs. The large elevated tub is designed to be used for Kur, with bath salts.

The surprise is to find such a well-designed, well-appointed house in a tiny village in an out-of-the-way place. These aren’t people of great affluence, obviously; they’re village folks. In Germany, the standard of living is so much higher for people who would, in other locales, be close to the bottom of the economic ladder. Here, there barely seems to be a bottom.

Mind not nimble today. We sat around all day yesterday. The plan was to go, with Hermann, to Weissensulz and various churches he’s redone—Bieberbach, Heinrichskirche—after they had shopped.

But when they came back at noon, they said travel to the Czech Republic seemed dangerous, due to the forecast of rain (Der Wetterberricht hat Regen ausgesacht, said one of those phrases in a German lesson book that seems never to leave the mind when more useful ones remain maddeningly beyond memory's grasp). So the day was a sit-around kind of day, and I feel dull and a bit edgy as a result.

I wish I could draw or paint the view from the window. I’m looking south and east, from the Wintergarten room. Sky is completely gray, but to the east, where the sun’s behind the clouds, there are bright spots of pale yellow light in the gray, where the clouds are less gray. All this over the roofs of neighbor houses, themselves the same pale yellow color. Hermann’s workshop is also on the southeast side of the house, itself the same peach color as the house, a very pleasant color. These muted pastels stand out against the unbroken white of fields and roofs.

To the south, in the distance, a dark, tree-covered hilltop. The hills are evergreens, but whether pines, junipers, or some other winter evergreen, I don’t know. There’s also a large old barn on this side of the house, of a gray, unpainted wood that seems to be commonly used by farmers here. In front of it are a greenhouse where the S.’s grow tomatoes and cucumbers in summer, and Hermann’s wood-drying shed, with neatly stacked pieces of wood he uses for his art work.

Further afield are snow-covered fields, and lives of fruit trees. Over the fields large blackbirds (crows?) are slowly gliding, seeking mice or other small animals in the snow, I imagine.

+ + + + +

Home follows us like the whipped cur wherever we go. From my car window, Bach playing on the radio, I watch the snow-covered hills of the Bavarian Oberpfalz pass . . . by . . . . They stretch over dark-firred mountains in the Czech Republic, Europe’s dark heart.

Then out of the corner of my eye, I catch a bird slowly circling the fields; and I’m back in Arkansas, on I-40 headed east, flocks of ducks and wild geese rising from the rice stubble with morning promise more than mouth can say, as my mother lies lost in a hospital bed I cannot reach.

+ + + + +

Heilige Abend has come and gone, so to speak. It is evening, 6:20, and we’re waiting for the “midnight” Mass at 10. But anti-climax is in the air. The family has gathered, R. from Regensburg and J. from Rötz, with her husband E. and child S.

The “children” seemed eager to come for a brief time and then go. They have their own lives. R. has moved far from his village origins. Hermann tells us R. did very well in school, and his friend is a Juristin. J., by contrast, did poorly, so that R. went to Gymnasium, J. to a trade school. R. speaks impeccable English, and J. hardly any—a surprise, given her generation. J. married an auto mechanic.

The village seems to be a place to be from. The city—Rötz, all as it is, and Regensburg—exerts a well-nigh irresistible attraction. The parents in the village represent the life to be left behind, so visits are infrequent, politely cool, and fraught with unspoken tensions. The village parents have come to prefer their quiet life in the country, which the children (and the unspoken tensions they introduce by their visits) unsettle. And the children are happy to make their perfunctory visits, pay filial respect, and return to their more exciting lives in the city.

Steve and I always seem to find ourselves in the anti-climactic moment, with the left-behind old people. I’d like (I think?) the excitement of a party tonight, or at least a walk along a city street with brightly lit windows.

Instead, it will be 10 P.M. “midnight” Mass in the village. I’ll be very much on display, the American guest.

+ + + + +

R. tells me the line about not wanting chocolate, but a man, is from a song of the 1960s or 1970s. So much for my amusement at it. And what of the ad for Thürn u. Taxis beer I saw in the paper today, which very much amused me? It showed a woman sipping beer from a large glass, here eyes closed in ecstasy.

What struck me as so funny when I saw it was the use of a woman, a sexy woman, to sell beer. Beer is a man’s drink, a football drink. A woman drinking beer, geht’s nicht. Men enjoying being men don’t want to be reminded of women, except as sex objects, ornaments draped across car hoods, perhaps. They certainly don’t want to be reminded of women’s sexuality.

In America, women don’t drink beer, at least not in beer commercials. In Germany beer is equally a woman’s drink, so the use of female sexuality to sell beer is perhaps not so strange after all.

What one culture sees as natural/normal, the-way-things-are, another culture raises its eyebrows at.

Distracted as I write. We’re in the Wohnzimmer with the lighted Christmas tree. The television is on. It’s a program about the history of Stille Nacht. I’m shocked at how well I understand it.

A small male choir (it’s the choir that’s small) is singing, as the camera pans across an 18th-century crèche that was in the church where Stille Nacht was first performed. It’s all very appealing.

But . . . who was it recently who told me of how pro-Nazi most Austrians really were? All day, as Hermann drove us to various churches in the countryside where he has renovated statues and paintings, I kept thinking, How did any of this help, when Nazi times came?

This is not a Protestant question. It’s not about the efficacy of church art and devotions related to such art. It’s about the efficacy of any rituals and devotional practices, when culture beckons or evil presses. If all this wonderful church art in Bayern bespeaks a deep-generations deep-piety, then why was the whole countryside not up in arms, as Hitler came to power? Why did anyone fight in his army? Why does every church have a conspicuous monument to the dead of the two world wars?

Oberpfalz, Kreis Waldmünchen 23.12.99: Boehmerwald and Dark Heart of Europe

When did I last write in this journal, and what has happened since then? Well, yesterday a trip into the Czech Republic to visit the archives in Pilsen.

Hermann S. drove us early, before sunrise, to Waldmünchen, where we met Georg. It was magical to see the snow-covered hills and little villages in the half dark.

Georg and his wife Resi met us in their house, both looking rather worried, she above all. We gave her presents, which she only half-acknowledged as she fussed over Georg, handing him a lunch (their word, pronounced German-style) she had prepared. Georg told us later she was concerned about road conditions, and both worried about the car being stolen. It was also his first trip driving to Tschechien; he’s gone before, but always with someone else driving.

The border crossing (just the other side of Waldmünchen) was a little tense. Normally, they only look at his passport and wave him on, Georg said. But Steve’s passport they took inside their station, and we waited a full five minutes as they . . . what? Checked some computer database? And why? Do Americans come into the Czech Republic and cause trouble? Or did they suspect he was not a bona fide American?

Georg says things were considerably friendlier when the border had just re-opened. For various reasons, tensions are now re-asserting themselves. The mix of surface joviality with underlying brutality in the border guards: it always makes me nervous, and cast a pall over the trip into this former Soviet fiefdom.

Almost immediate after we entered Tschechien, Georg showed us the site of a former Böhmisch (i.e., German) village which the Czechs razed completely when they expelled all Germans in 1946. There’s no sign of it now, at least not under the snow. Evidently, to keep the border secure, brush was allowed to grow up all along the border, and according to Georg, an electric fence was erected the length of the border.

The ridge of mountains that form the beginning of the Böhmerwald is another barrier, and must be part of the reason (the natural reason) that the Grenze between Bayern and Böhmen ran just here. The people, at least the German-speaking ones, were, after all, the same as the Bavarians. Borders are often such unnatural divisions that it helps to find a natural barrier to justify them.

In the snow, the mountainous, forested area is pretty, but also a bit forbidding. Without modern means of travel, it must have been very forbidding. Even yesterday, there was beaten-down snow on the roads. I can understand Resi’s apprehension: had it snowed again before our return—or, worse, rained—these roads would have been well-nigh impassable.

There’s a stillness in the woods I notice often in middle-European areas, here abetted by history. Passing through the Böhmerwald, one feels as if one is entering the very heart of Europe—I’m tempted to write, “the dark heart.” I had read the day before that the east-west watershed of the continent does run very close to Steve’s ancestral village, Weissensulz. That makes the heart metaphor more compelling.

And Georg tells us that the forest-and-mountain-chain acts as a weather barrier, blocking the very cold weather from Russian in winter. The barrier also blocks wet weather from the Atlantic, so that Böhmen has drier, sunnier weather in summer than Bayern has. Georg maintains that the Böhmisch farmers were outstanding, and had larger, more prosperous farms than their Bavarian cousins had.

The weather barrier manifested itself almost immediately, as we drove into heavy fog for miles and miles, the east side of the forest. Here, one begins to wind through small, very grim viallages, most of them at one time German, although one we passed through had always been Czech, according to Georg, who also says that the German villages were at one time prosperous, cheery, well-maintained.

Not now. Now, all these places—anyplace we saw en route to Pilsen—look like the backside of nowhere. I try to imagine the life of, say, a teenager in such a place. At least in winter, everything seems dirty, deprived, geographically, culturally, and spiritually closed in. Perhaps some other, more appealing, life is going on inside the apartment buildings and houses we passed, but not in the street—not to my eye, at least.

On to Pilsen: also exceedingly dirty, industrial, and forbidding, though the downtown squares by night, as we left for our drive back, were pretty, with Christmas lights and lots of people shopping in the evening. The city seemed more active by night than it was by day, when we arrived.

Steve had good luck in the archives, as he, Georg, and I pored over 18th- and 19-century records of the Weissensulz parish and its mother parish, Heiligenkreuz. We were able to follow the Steinsdörfer line back into the 1600s, always in Weissensulz, where Steve’s ancestors were scribes, teachers, then sievemakers and farmers.

I got little feel for Czechs and Czech culture on this quick trip. The people we met in the archives were friendly, trying out a few words of English and laughing at their attempts. We had to communicate in German. They, the way they live, seem lost somewerhe in the 1940s or 1950s. There’s just not anywhere near the level of material comfort you find in Germany, where everything’s so cushy and well set-up, or in the U.S. At least, if the material comfort’s there, it’s not immediately apparent to the eye of a casual observer.

And everywhere, all over Western Bohemia, industrial pollution hangs like a heavy gray curtain, compounded in winter by the brown coal (or so it’s called in German) the Czechs burn. Its foul smell is everywhere; you can’t even shut it out of the car, as you drive. It’s one of the reasons so many buildings are begrimed.

Oberpfalz, Kreis Waldmünchen, 21.12.1999: Winter Gardens and Blue Hills of Bohemia

*In Bavaria, at Steve’s cousins’ in the Oberpfalz. I’m sitting in a room they call the Wintergartenzimmer, off the kitchen at the back of the house. It has windows on two sides, floor to ceiling, and on the side that joins the kitchen, a beautiful corner stove for heat. This has a marble or perhaps faux marble top, resting on a stone base that forms the top of the stove. The stone is graven. A similar stone is beneath the stove.

The room has a tile floor of light tan, and white walls. In the middle is a table with an old-seeming sewing machine for its base. I feel quite sure Hermann S. built the room. He’s amazingly talented. He paints, gilds and repaints church statues, works in wood.

It’s a simple room, but so esthetically pleasing. Atop the stove are two ebony statues, I think of Masai people, since there is a similar statue upstairs that Hermann tells us comes from the Masai people. One the wall over my shoulder is a statue of St. George killing the dragon. The saint has a brightly colored cape, and the base on which the statue sits is gilded—Hermann S.’s own work. The Bavarians don’t leave their saints in church; they bring them home.

Over the table is a light fixture made from what appears to be an old oxen yoke, of darkened wood and leather with iron studs. The door to the room is plain wood, but ornamented with a carved scroll beneath the window. Outside, as I look at the peach-colored stucco walls of the house, I see that Hermann S. has painted scrolls of gray, yellow, and brown above and below the window—the Bavarian sensibility, to ornament.

It snowed last night and during the previous day, perhaps for days before here. The snow must be about 10 inches deep, but the temperatures are just above freezing, so the snow is packing slowly. Rain is predicted for Wednesday—the 23rd. It so, I hope it washes the ice and snow off the roads, so that a trip to Weissensulz will be possible. Getting here yesterday afternoon was a bit tricky. Dark had begun to fall as we left the autobahn and started our trek through the Oberpfälzisch hills and villages. Several times, the care went into skids when we tried to stop and turn. Steve’s expertise pulled us out.

Very peaceful hear, the snow overlaying everything, the stove purring efficiently in the corner. But quiet for the visitor. I feel in my bones that if I lived here, I’d soon find it very unquiet. There is, almost literally, nothing to do, not even a shop or a bakery. The young leave, as they leave the Eifel. For those whose families have long been established, as the S.’s have, it’s home, and Hermann S.’s house shows that one can make a life here, a pleasant one. Still, a sadness hangs over the place, the sense that a way of life is soon to pass, as the young go to Rötz or father afield to Regensburg, and the parents nurture the village—for whom?

The sadness of any passing. What were those lines I thought of yesterday, as drove, one of those many blockbuster opening sentences I devise, never to complete the story they begin? “Being Irish, they enjoyed reciting the names of things, especially things that have passed from the earth. My grandmother used to recite the names of apples she knew in her youth, which were no more: Yates, Mollie’s Delicious, the Cullasaja, and on and on, a formidable litany. And when she’d take me to her attic to explore the contents of trunks up there—her mother’s, Kate Ryan the immigrant, her brother John’s, who died at her house, her mother-in-law’s—there would be lessons in forgotten quilt patterns, the Double Wedding Ring, Geese A-Flyin’, Broken Dishes. Many of the unquilted tops in her mother’s trunk she had pieced along with Grandma Kate. To see them was to remember a whole history now goine, since each quilt top incorporated pieces taken from the clothes of family members no longer alive—the black silk dresses of Kate herself, who was perpetually in mourning for a lost child, the bright sprigged gingham of little Lizzie who died as a girl, or the blue denim workpants of Tommy, who had fallen dead hoeing cotton one hot summer day.”

Frau S. comes and goes as I write, a stricken look on her face. Unlike her husband, who’s solid and very relaxed, she flits nervously here and there. Even in Germany, I’ve never seen a house so immaculate. When we were here at Fronleichnam, she was preparing her yard for the procession by pouncing like a bird on infinitesimal pieces of detritus in the grass, as we men sat talking in the evening air.

There’s something fierce in the busyness, the cleanliness of German woman, something I wouldn’t want to encounter in an enemy. Even as I write, she’s moving purposefully across the snow-covered driveway with a pail in her hand, talking to a neighbor all the while, poised as if to run back inside to complete her chores. She has an apron on, of course, that blue work apron that seems standard for so many village women.

What she tells me when she flits in and out, I’m never entirely sure. She speaks broad Bavarian, rapid-fire, in a guttural, forceful tone. She’s brought a carafe of tea, and is telling me how to line up the red dot with the opening. And now she has bottles of mineral water, lemonade, and homemade apple juice. I think she’s saying—yes, I do understand this clearly—that the apple juice is cold from the cellar, and I shouldn’t drink it cold for fear of harm to my throat.

They eat only bio food. No white sugar or flour, only whole grain and brown sugar from Africa. Breakfast this morning was a very delicious muesli with grated apples and grains. Dinner last night was wonderful—a fresh trout fried in butter with almonds (truite almandine), served with parsley potatoes and salad—a really good salad of onion, bell pepper, lettuce, and tomato, with a simple vinaigrette. The dressing was the first non-sweet, non mayonnaise or cream dressing I’ve had on this trip to Germany.

*This posting resumes a travel narrative whose last installment was posted on this blog on 12 May. Now that I've re-located my misplaced travel journal, I can complete the saga of this particular trip to Germany.