Braunschweig 21.7.1998: Limpid Maaren and Wood Sprites

Leaving Koblenz, 8 A.M., for Braunschweig yesterday, another drive to the Eifel—to Kelberg—for Steve to meet a man with information on the Schafer family. Then on to Dreis, where he bought a history of the village from the former bürgermeister.

Again, that beautiful landscape, where wheat was being harvested on a fine summer day, a hot one (30º). Part of its appeal is that, from a ridge, one can see so far—the rolling volcanic land, the little Maaren with their limpid water, and the fields. It’s also tame, a bit shaggier and poorer, than many of the farming areas of Germany, including the Bavarian Oberpfalz.

Which makes me wonder if the people here aren’t a good bit Celtic. I suppose I ask this because Herr M. and his wife—the former bürgermeister of Dreis—looked so Irish-Scottish to me: small, fine-boned, piercing blue eyes. They were sitting outside in folding chairs, and could just have easily been in the Ozarks or Texas, he with his cowboy shirt and jeans, she with her faded old print dress.

Their air, too, was Celtic—the open hospitality, the snap and spark of wit and laughter, the acerbic twist of tongue. Were the river valleys of the region Romanized and Germanized, while these high hinterlands with their poorer soil, lands which sheep still graze, and their solemn womblike little churches so different from the Baroque ones of Bavaria, left to the Celts?

After the Eifel trip, dinner beside the Rhine in Landstein. The food was gutbürgerlich, fulfilling three of Jup’s requirements for a good feed: gutbürgerlich, viel, und billig. We ate outside in a beer garden as we drank beer and listened to the raucous tables all around, full of Rhinelanders enjoying the fine summer evening beside the river, and guzzling beer and eating heartily of potatoes and pork. The gusto with which Germans tuck in—and celebrate—can be positively frightening.

Jup and Marian were very kind to us. We had wondered how much they knew about our relationship, and what they thought. On the Eifel tour, Marian asked what the church thinks of our living together. We told them about our experiences with our jobs, and they were furious. Turns out they have many gay friends, and feel very attracted to gay people.

A footnote to what I said re: Herr and Frau M. looking like an elderly Texas couple. What small-town Texas mayor would be able to produce a history of his community, spanning (and detailing) its history from its inception. Here, the Irish analogy works, but not the American ones. The interest in one’s tiny local area is as intense as in Ireland (and the small villages and sparse settlement again speak to me of Celtic origins).

Footnote to comment about the Eifel landscape: and those dark little forests scattered here and there, with their cool depths and whispers of ancient folk like and wood sprites . . . .

Ӧhe 15.7.1998, Koblenz 17.7.1998: Changed Skies, Same Self

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare current (Horace).

Certainly true in my experience. Couldn’t be more miserably depressed, and I wonder why I’ve crossed the seas to find the same pit I find at home. At least that pit has comfortable niches and contours that have grown familiar to me. . . .

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17.7.1998: In Koblenz now. We drove here yesterday to spend several days with Jup and Marian F. A little walk around the old city last night, in the rain. Had wine/beer at a beer garden beside the Mosel, overlooking a statue to Kaiser Wilhelm. Then to a Chinese restaurant in the city run by Vietnamese neighbors of Jup and Marion.

Those Chinese menus in German are always mystifying. Everything sounds so . . . frank, not exotic, as Asian food ought to be, but described to death in graphic German carnivorous terms. And the food’s equally mystifying: nothing approximating American ideas of Chinese food. And certainly not Chinese food itself.

The soups are invariably turgid with something like cornstarch, and tomato-based. Hot dishes are described in ominous capitals as SCHARF!!, and simply aren’t. Garlic is unheard of. Nothing even smells Chinese; vegetables are a whisper of a garnish (and aren’t anywhere near something Oriental). Meat’s the name of the game.

I’m homesick, and beginning to pick, pick. Scenes of home keep flashing through my mind, and God! how I miss the dogs, and feel guilty at being away from them.

Koblenz seems to be a nice city, what we’ve seen of it, though both now and the first time I was here, it struck me as a bit grimy and industrial. Jup and Marian showed us where portions of one of the old churches, perhaps the Liebfraukirche, are having to be replaced, as pollution erodes the stonework. (Or did they mean only cleaned?)

In the old counting house, now a Rhineland museum, in the old city, we watched a clock chime 6. The clock has eyes going back and forth (the pendulum), and as it chimes the hours, it sticks out its tongue, once for each hour. Very droll.

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9:30 P.M. Just back from a day’s trip to Luxembourg and Belgium. The horrible cold, wet weather of the past days continued until our return, when it began to clear at Trier. The weather, the scary autobahns, being cooped up with Steve and my own horrible self: all have me fit to be tied.

What can I say of Luxembourg? We just drove through, so any impressions would be very superficial.

The bit I saw was . . . nondescript, as the guidebooks say: neither French, German, nor Belgian, nor an identifiable mix of the three. Just itself, its unremarkable self.

Got lost trying to get around the city to head to Pétange, our destination, where Steve’s ancestors (Lommel) lived on the Belgian border. Stopped for help at a Rastplatz, and was quite an experience—a jumble of Germans, French, Luxembourgers, all eating with that eager vivacity of lunch at a European Rastplatz (well, vivacious because of the French; none of that dreamy self-absorption Germans bring to food eaten alone). Harrowing, the mob of people and the babble of languages I understood only in fragments.

Two young men even more harrowing. One had his hair tied up in a kind of horsetail thing young toughs now affect in Europe. Had a black shirt with a slogan denoting him as some kind of “Killah.” Some girl said something to him that he evidently didn’t like, and he replied with an animalistic growl and face, something about Luxembourgish. I took it he was speaking the Luxembourgish dialect and told her to lump it or leave it. The naked hostility of it was astonishing—nationalism reasserting itself via hooligan fascism, as the millennium approaches.

Then on to Pétange, which we reached sometime after noon. An unattractive, grimy little place with a forlorn, ill-used air. Granted, it was chilly for July, but not raining: even so, not a soul anywhere in sight.

We wanted to find the church secretary, the church itself being locked. We saw a man eyeing us from his doorway, the house next to the church. I asked him in French where the church office was. His wife was there. He spoke French to her, but somehow I could tell they spoke Luxembourgish instead of French as their mother tongue.

A sign at the parish office said it would be closed until 2:30, so Steve decided to drive on into Belgium to Hachy, where his cousin Robert Lommel lives, past Athus, the ancestral village. We passed Hachy, seeing no sign for it, and turned off at Habay.

There, went into the tourist stop restroom, and in English, a man said to me, “There’s no paper. Can you ask for some?” I dutifully did so, in French, and it appeared. How he knew I spoke English and could speak French is beyond me . . . .

At Hachy, found Robert Lommel, who told us the villages up to Hachy from the Luxembourg border were all Luxembourgish-speaking, and from there, French, but French is now prevailing. The whole area seemed a bit dreary—again, that not-quite-this-nor-that feeling. I thought of Rimbaud and his need to escape the nearby French Ardennes. I understood that need. All seemed so bourgeois, so Catholic in the narrowest sense. Signs at the tourist stop bar proclaimed in loud, endless letters that drunkenness and the moral corruption of youth wouldn’t be tolerated. (Nice for a change to understand the signs without effort, in both Luxembourg and Belgium.)

Then back, with a stop at Trier to shop for Marian and Jup’s birthday, and a dinner of vegetable soup and salad at Zum Domstein, where Steve and I ate a few years ago. I like Trier, with its French air (garlic bread—and bread!—with the soup and salad).

Beautiful drive in the Eifel, which I find so appealing. Those silent, dark hills with little villages and golden fields, and the Roman presence at Trier—they tell a tale of a very ancient history, one fundamental to what became Europe.

Ӧhe 14.7.1998: Ordnung and More Ordnung

Just had one of those absolutely maddening German discussions in which we decided, through endless back and forth and consideration of every possible eventuality, who would sit where today, as we each work on some academic (or, in the case of T. and K., reading) project.

Why don’t simple manners sort things like this out—we all know where we’d least disturb the other. So it makes sense to light there, silently. Is this all about German order, or that we need to have each room used for what it’s meant for?

Ӧhe, 13.7.1998

Waiting now to go to the ferry for a day trip to Denmark. Yesterday a nice relaxed day with continuous sun, in contrast to the preceding day, when it rained intermittently. I find the vista very relaxing when the sun’s shining: the light blue northern sky, the gold of sand and wheat, all the greens starred with white and pink shrub roses.

Not much to say, except that it’s nice to be here, under sunny skies, enjoying life in a summer cottage. Even if we did perhaps indulge too liberally in the meal I cooked last night—stuffed eggplant, fettucine with walnuts, cauliflower, and red bell peppers, salad, and fruit with ice cream . . . . Lots of red wine, or course, followed by a medicinal grappa that didn’t save W., K., or me from a bad night . . . .

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Spent the day in Denmark. Took the ferry from Gelting to Fåborg, then on by car to Rudkøbing on the island of Langeland. It turned out to be a very touristy little place, much to W.’s and K.’s surprise, since they’d been there some years ago, and it wasn’t that way then. The 18th- and 19th-century merchants’ houses were interesting, several with neo-classical façades, all painted in pleasing pastels, of which a yellow gold predominated.

The countryside also pleasant—rolling hills planted to wheat, barley, and what seemed to be turnips, with roadside stands selling potatoes and new potatoes (nyekartofler) and strawberries (jordbaer). The countryside and its cottages, and above all the shoreline of Fåborg, reminded me of Waterford—same culture predominating, since Waterford was founded by the Vikings?

From Rudkøbing on to Odense, where we had falafels (!) and then walked around the city in the late afternoon. Signs of H.C. Andersen everywhere—the museum, his boyhood home, a house in which he lived, a statue of the tin soldier. We had coffee, speaking a combination of English and German to the waitress. The Danes seem to be between the two languages, with perhaps more facility in the former—or less willingness to speak the latter, even when they know it.

As the shops closed at 5:30 and we had to be at the ferry soon after 6, we drove back to Fåborg and walked briefly around the town—more of those pastel houses, many with doors painted in blues and grays, their geometric shapes brought into relief by darker blue lines.

Then the ferry back, where we treated W., K., and T. to a buffet. They like to avail themselves of it every so often, and find it very good, but it didn’t excite me. Several strange adaptations of American and Tex-Mex dishes—barbecue ribs, guacamole (thin, runny, tasteless, and full of mayonnaise), and salsa (big chunks of mystery vegetables in a sweet red sauce). There were fried shrimp in a thick batter that managed to be both gummy and insipid, and about four potato dishes, all equally without savor. Ah well. The baguettes and butter were good, and the Carlsberg beer a good accompaniment.

And now to bed, and Rimbaud’s African years . . . .

Ӧhe 11.7.1998: Slate Seas and Linden Alleys

At Ӧhe now. Steve and I just walked along the seacoast under lowering skies, until it began to rain. Nice to see this place in summer—high summer—as it was dead of winter when we were last here. I’m not really a seaside person, or, at least, have never thought of myself as one. But I quite like the Baltic seacoast today. Those slate seas with hints of green, blue, even purple, are very pleasing to the eye, with small sailboats far out on the horizon. The sand has bits of a rose-colored seaweed strewn across it, in some places very artistically arranged, with pieces of a seashell that’s dark blue, with gray bands and glinting mother of pearl.

Sitting now in the cottage’s sitting room, where two large windows overlook a linden alley that runs alongside fields of wheat now gold for the harvest. Again, a vista pleasing to the eye, one restful to contemplate.

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Charles Nichols, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-1891 (London: Random House, 1998): “It is a restlessness in the heart, an impossible desire: one which all travelers in some measure feel . . . .” (p. 14).

Amsterdam 9.7.1998 (2): Little Hagiographies Amidst Pimps, and Whores

The next day, more walking—first to the Albert Cuyp market south of the Heineken brewery. A disappointment, since its many booths were almost all selling new things. We did buy some cheesecloth, aka muslin, to add to our collection of window treatments.

Then more kicking around the city, followed by beer at a café near Suzanne’s, on a gracht, where I felt very sophisticated and European watching people of every nationality pass by, sitting beside this woman with an astonishing unruly nimbus of dark frizzy hair anointed with shocking red here and there.

Suzanne talked vivaciously about her husband’s affairs, her sometimes unsatisfying relationship with her current boyfriend, and a dove that appeared at her house a few days before her son died, and then remained, walking in into the house as mourners gathered. That death understandably looms large in her mind (he was burnt to death in a barn fire, while camping with friends). She talked about how, independently, all family members decided that the color of the funeral was to be yellow, and how she “saw” a Tibetan monk and a rabbi at the funeral, and lo! it came to pass. All this talk was embroidered with talk of white doves and her son’s continuing presence in her life.

I say vivaciously, but that’s not quite the word. Suzanne is energetic, but a bit tattered at the edges. Like anyone with a message, she tends to hold the floor, and with Germanic earnestness, made even more serious by her Calvinist heritage. I’d tend to think her talk about her son is the slightly deranged attempt of a mother to retrieve something, anything, from such an abruptly ended life.

Except. Except the first evening I met Suzanne, she quickly sketched in the missing pieces, as I told her, not telling the whole story, about Simpson’s death and Mother’s decline. That showed me that she’s a woman of astonishing acuity of perception. To such a woman, why shouldn’t such unbelievable things happen? And there are those strange eyes, not quite blue, green, or yellow, but somewhere in between the three, which could so easily be cats’ eyes, if the pupils were slit. I half believed her when she said she’s half a witch, and wasn’t surprised when she said her father’s name is some Swiss equivalent of “Welshman,” and her dark hair and light eyes evidence of her Celtic heritage. Mountain people are so strange . . . .

And oh, I almost forgot, that visit to the Protestant community—very interesting. Herman J., our tour guide, was himself interesting: all head and sweet piety and unawakened sexuality beneath it all. I sensed this, and wondered if he were gay, and as we drank beer, Suzanne told us how emotionally landlocked K. and his brothers are, and how she’s wondered if Herman is gay, or has a sex life.

Everything he told us had the form of a little hagiography: the Story of How We Acquired the House; the Old Synagogue/Monastery; the Redemption of the Sex Cinema; the Burning of All the Houses Around; etc.

In the very bottom of one of the buildings is a tiny chapel that’s thought to be an old medieval cistern, and where a Jewish family were successfully hidden during the war: an eerie place. The main chapel’s an interesting room, one that’s simultaneously Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. Around its side and back walls is a series of water troughs, stone ones with pebbles in the bottom, each larger and deeper than the last. They function as baptismal fonts and pools, so that each denomination can baptize as it prefers. When not in use as a baptistry, the series of pools is a constantly running stream, which is recycled, and which contains a few drops of Jordan water, Herman told us.

When we entered the chapel, Michael, a curious little man, was incensing it with a proper ecclesiastical censer. He turned out to be the custodian of the chapel, and was strange, indeed—small, dark, lithe, with tight black leather pants and that holy hostility of a monk whose inner sanctum is invaded by gross laity. I’ve met them everywhere. They must cooperate with the officially sanctioned hospitality that monastic life’s all about. But they do so disdainfully, resentfully, bristling with superiority.

Speaking of gross laity and our invasion, Herman told us a long, involved story I’m not quite sure I understood about how the room the chapel’s in once functioned as part of a porno cinema. It’s this same room that might, just might, have also been a synagogue.

The chapel has an iconostasis, altar, icons, and holy pictures—interesting, that Protestant need for ritual (incense, no less) even when the Word continues to predominate (the chapel floor’s an always widening set of concentric circles beginning at the pulpit and moving out onto the sidewalk outside). As Herman explained, the vision of the community is to live the gospel within the red light district. It’s the gospel, the Word, and not the Eucharist, that centers the community, and which it wishes to bring to the world.

All of which made me feel rather eerily distant from the place, from Herman and the tour. At one time, I’d have been energized by it all, and there was that old quasi-erotic attraction to the chapels, the life of repose, meditation, and community, the seriousness of purpose.

But the . . . zeal . . . was also off-putting and the little hagiographies with which Herman stitched the tour together were irritating. How can we be so confident that we—we!—represent the gospel, in the midst of the pimps and whores, junkies and porno purveyors. To say that God keeps preserving the place from fire (when all the neighboring houses burned), etc., feels to me like saying that God chooses to preserve some rather than others. Not all the Jews in Amsterdam survived the Holocaust . . . .

Well, yes, maybe I am the seed that fell on rocky soil, and I now want to find any excuse to dispense with faith. But I don’t know how to get around it: the followers of Christ grow, ever more powerfully, into a formidable obstacle to my belief.

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I just thought of something as I read Colm Toibin’s account of his walk along the Irish border. It’s a bit like Amhlaoibh O’Suilleabhain’s account of his walk around Co. Kilkenny in the early 19th century. Walking around, poking our noses into things: an Irish travelers’ tradition, one I may be carrying on. Toibin’s like O’Sullivan in the alacrity with which he accepts free feeds. And am I any different?

Amsterdam 9.7.1998: Mythopoeic Imaginings, Gawking and Glomming Tourists

Leaving Amsterdam—gray skies, a slight oppressiveness to the weather after two rather nice days. And I’m thinking desultory thoughts—about why some cities and places rather than others attract artists; and about what voice one uses to write a travelogue here, now, at the end of the 20th century.

About the first question: it’s clear that Amsterdam is one of those cities. Steve and I felt that immediately. I wonder why. There’s, of course, that intangible thing called charm: the small grachts, whose scale helps them retain the small perspective so essential to good art, which always has to find the world in the grain of sand; ad the way in which each gracht, still water and reflected sky, creates a quiet little world of its own in a bustling city.

There’s also the . . . what? whiff of decay? The old houses, the faded glory, the omnipresent sex industry, the drugs: these form a moist and fertile bed for creativity, which never bubbles up so easily in dry and sun-scorched worlds. And there’s the alternate economy of small boutiques, flea markets, black markets—an economy of barter, exchange, tom-foolery and trickery—that always thrives in such a city.