The Frankfurter Kreuz, the most heavily
traffi cked reef-knot of expressways
in Europe, has a vertical dimension as well:
flights in and out of the continent’s busiest
airport traverse the space a few hundred
meters overhead. On a June morning
in 1971, Christa and I threaded our
way through the interchange and headed
east on the Nuremberg Autobahn. Within
twenty minutes we found ourselves transported
to a more peaceful realm, the rolling
woodlands of the Spessart mountains.
Things have not always been so quiet here,
either. The Spessart range is the stump of a
magmatic arc thrust up some four hundred
million years ago, during the Silurian era.
Other upheavals have occurred too, most
recent among them the Nazis’ Endkampf,
which petered out in these parts during the
spring of 1945.
Being in Germany represented a
homecoming for Christa, who was born
in Frankfurt and spent her childhood in
a village forty miles to the north, in the
Westerwald. “You’re here to honor your
wife?” a woman asked me. And, yes, that
was true. On December 18, 1970, Christa
and I had eloped. Since the day had turned
chilly, Christa, rather than wearing a
white dress as she had planned, substituted
the blue velvet one with a floral motif on
the collar that she’d worn on our first real
date. (How dear she looked!) A Franciscan
monk at Mission San Luis Rey married us
in a scene out of Romeo and Julietâhappily
without the fallout that star-crossed couple
My mother was miffed. Christa’s
took it in stride. The year in Germany was
to be our deferred honeymoon.
* * *
The Spessart range lies mostly within
Franconia, a region that stretches from a
point twenty miles east of the Frankfurter
Kreuz to the Czech frontier. In its heyday,
Franconia had been one of the five great
tribal duchies of Germany. Its present
boundaries date from the Napoleonic era,
when Bavaria annexed most of the eastern
Frankish lands. The Franconians have
done what they could to get used to this
arrangement, but after two hundred years
they still don’t see themselves as Bavarians.
Christa, who has the high cheekbones
characteristic of the Franks, looks right in
place in this corner of the world. That’s
not surprising, since her paternal grandmother
came from Zimmern, in Lower
Franconia.
An hour’s drive beyond the Frankfurter
Kreuz we turned off the Autobahn at the
Heidingsfeld exit. Beneath us in the valley
lay WĂźrzburg, a city of some hundred thousand
residents spread out along both banks
of the Main. It was to be our home for the
next fourteen months. WĂźrzburg could
hardly have looked more tranquil on that
June morning Christa and I first surveyed
it, yet the city had, we knew, seen its share
of turbulence. Situated at the crossroads of
major land and water arteries, it was from
the earliest times a center of commerce and
in particular of the trade in spices (GewĂźrze,
hence WĂźrzburg). On its western flank
rises the Marienberg, which has been
fortifi ed for three millennia, initially by
the Celts and, beginning in the thirteenth
century of our era, by the prince-bishops
who ruled over the townsfolk below from
an imposing, and remarkably handsome,
fortress. To the east, at a corresponding
elevation, stand the concrete-and-glass
slabs of the new campus of the university,
where I would be teaching. In the valley
between these two uplands we observed a
profusion of towers and domes and in the
midst of it all a resplendent baroque palace
built by the prince-bishops when they
came down from the Marienberg early in
the eighteenth century. To the north, the
Stein, the most notable vineyard in Franconia,
slopes steeply upwards. Its shelllimestone
soil yields superb MĂźller-Thurgaus
and Silvaners, whose finely structured
but firm mineral backbone arouses in
one who drinks them a suspicion of some
remote sea.
* * *
Without Christa’s mother we’d never
have gotten our apartment in WĂźrzburg.
The city was host not only to eighteen
thousand students but to a sizeable U. S.
garrison. Housing was tight. Soldiers who
had brought their families over generally
tried to live off post; they were not prized
as tenants. “What, you’re an American?”
one prospective landlady gasped. “Why
then you’d most likely take two or three
showers a day and burn all the lights.”
We’d been searching for the better part of
a week when Mutti took pity on us. It was
she who turned up the flat looking out over
the Steinbachtal, a forested valley crisscrossed
with hiking trails on the outskirts
of the city. Mutti charmed the owner, who
lived on the floor above it, with the tale of
a daughter who had strayed into the wilds
of California but was now, Gott sei Dank,
restored to her native soil.
When we arrived to sign the lease, our
new landlord was visibly surprised. Mutti
had not judged it necessary to mention that
her daughter had acquired an American
husband. What mollified him was the fact
that I would not be cruising around the
landscape in a Patton tank but teaching
at the university. Since he was himself a
professor of brass instruments at the local
conservatory, he concluded that the two
of us, as members of the intellectual elite,
would get along. And for the most part
we did. Our landlordâlet’s call him Herr
Blaeser, “Mr. Trumpeter,” in honor of
the wicked horn he blewâdid his best to
make us feel comfortable, even bringing a
radio down to our quarters so that I could,
as he explained, catch news from the home
front on the Armed Forces Network.
Herr Blaeser knew about homesickness.
The Russians had picked him up at the end
of the war and put him to work building
roads in Siberia. “Never again will they
have such good roads,” he reflected. He
sucked in his cheeks to indicate just how
meager he had grown under the Soviet
knout. Fortunately repatriation had revived
him; now whenever Herr Blaeser took a
seat, at home anyway, he unhitched his belt.
The lesson he had drawn from five years of
forced laborâthe sole lesson, as we discoveredâ
was that no country should seek to
occupy another, especially when the other
country was as big as Russia. On the basement
level of the house, right below our
apartment, the Blaesers had constructed
an atomic bunker that doubled as a wine
cellar, so that if doomsday came the sting
would not be all that great.
* * *
The fall of 1971 was unusually dry
and sunny, a gift to the winegrowers,
who were looking forward to a bumper
harvest and, it just might be, a once-in-acentury
wine. Of course the glorious fall
was a gift to us too. We loved seeing the
late afternoon light gild the roofs of the
villas below us. Once we had finished our
day’s work, we’d go for long walks in the
Steinbachtalâpast the old inn where the
mailcoach had stopped, the leaves of the
chestnut trees in its courtyard filmed with
dust, then along the path by the Kneippbad,
whose salving waters promised relief to the
arthritics who moved in a procession from
one pool to the next, and finally on into a
mixed forest, hemlock and beech mainly,
where we’d sometimes come across an old
professor well-known in our corner of
Franconia for his pacifist sympathies. He’d
sit abstractedly on a bench, drawing intersecting
circles in the dirt with his walking
stick.
However fine the weather, we did have
work to do. All through that autumn filled
with days like wine we took turns banging
away on a borrowed typewriter that transposed
the y‘s and z‘s. Christa was midway
through a dissertation on The Ringânot
Wagner’s cycle but an epic of sorts, laced
with ribald humor, by a fifteenth-century
Swiss poet named Heinrich Wittenweiler.
I was involved in a study of Malcolm
Lowry, whose reputation rests chiefly on
his novel Under the Volcano, the story of
a former British consul in Mexico whose
thirst for arcane knowledge is exceeded
only by his craving for mescal and, ultimately,
for death. Wittenweiler and Lowry
were our house guests for the entire year.
During the winter break they accompanied
us, stashed in the trunk of our Audi,
as far as Istanbul, although I admit that
while we were on the road we looked into
those boxes only two or three times.
There were moments when we just
had to get away from books and papers.
Our usual recourse was to jump in the car
and head off into the countryside. That
was how we came upon Sommerhausen,
a wine village six miles south of WĂźrzburg
with a largely intact medieval wall.
Above the arch through which you enter
town you’ll find the Torturmtheater (Gate
Tower Theatre), with its diminutive stage
and seats for a mere fifty patrons. That fall
the resident troupe was playing Faust. The
theatre was the domain of Luigi Malipiero,
an eighty-year-old magus whose
chief pastime was endeavoring to seduce
the local Gretchens.
Much as we cherished the Torturmtheater
and the tales of its founder’s caprices,
the chief attraction of Sommerhausen was
gastronomicâthe cordon bleu at the cafĂŠrestaurant
Zum goldenen Ochsen. A slab of
veal stuffed with ham and gruyère and
covering most of the plate went for 6.50
DM (a little over two dollars); we were
living, as the expression goes, like God in
Franceâor, what suited us as well, in Franconia.
The Oehler family, then as now the
proprietors of the Golden Ox, believed in
slow food. You waited for a good half hour,
listening to the chef pound the cutlets, the
source of which was a calf he had slaughtered
himself. During the interval you
were expected to drink a glass, maybe two
glasses, of the local pinot blanc. This was
not a punishment. We became once-aweek
regulars and fairly friendly with the
Oehlers, although naturally we couldn’t
hope to find ourselves in the same class
as the natives, who by tacit custom had a
special table reserved for them. Not even
Malipiero, who had lived in the village for
many years and enjoyed a certain celebrity,
would have been welcome at the Stammtisch.
You have to be a fourth-generation
Sommerhäuser before you dare to sit
there.
* * *
By November the beeches in the Steinbachtal
had unleaved themselves, and the
university was about to shift into gear. The
German academic calendar is a couple of
months out of phase with ours; moreover,
that fall the Bavarian universities were
starting a week later than usual to accommodate
a cohort of twenty-year-olds
whose release date from the Bundeswehr
had been delayed. We didn’t dwell on it,
but WĂźrzburg lay just eighty miles from
the Fulda gap, the point at which, should
cold war turn to hot, the Soviet tank
columns would almost surely attempt to
break through. Would the Blaesers make
room for us in their bunker? There was no
mention of that in our lease.
I reported for duty at the Uni, as the
students called it, and received a warm
greeting from the chair of the English
department. “Well met, sir!” she cried.
Frau Professor Doctor Gunhild Schneewind
(as we’ll call her) was a Renaissance
scholar who had studied English in the
1930s, when travel to Britain was discouraged;
she had acquired English as one
might Latin or Greek. Once the economic
miracle took hold in the 1950s, Germans
began hitting the road at the slightest
opportunity. But the miracle occurred too
late for Professor Schneewind. She was
in a difficult position anyway, given that
female professors were at that point such a
rarity in Germany. Frau Schnweewind was
always generous in her dealings with me,
even lightening my teaching load during
the second semester. Her secretary, Frau
Goetsch, was helpful too. Before signing
on at the university, she had worked for
the U. S. military. When I asked her for
anything, access to the mimeograph or
whatever, she would reply, “No sweat.”
The day-to-day operations of the department
were handled by Ernst Häublein,
whose English was everything Professor
Schneewind’s wasn’t, mainly because he
had a natural gift for the language but also
because he had spent a good bit of time
in the U. S. and had brought home an
American wife. (I wish I could say that
being married to Christa had produced an
equivalent effect on my German.) Whenever
we felt a twinge of longing for the
States, Christa and I would head over to
the Häubleins’ for a piece of Suzy’s apple
pieâa more effective fix than listening to
AFN on Herr Blaeser’s radio. And when
it wasn’t Suzy’s pie, it was a dĂŠgustation of
Frankish wines. Ernst was a connoisseur.
The Häubleins’ daughter, Christine,
was already, at age two-and-a-half, a dedicated
party animal. Around midnight,
long after she was supposed to have gone
to sleep, we’d spot a small shadow on
the frosted pane of the living room door.
Often she’d be wearing those pajamas with
the hood and rabbit ears. In defiance of all
the admonitions in Spock and Brazelton,
Tini and I would dance to Beatles records
into the small hours. “Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds” was our song. My funny
bunny! Of course I had no illusions about
the place I occupied in her world; priority
there was accorded to her imaginary friend
Markus, whom she and Christa carried on
a stick between them when we went for
walks. On one of our outings, a visit to a
Baroque church in a nearby village, Tini
and I found ourselves on opposite sides of
the screen in a confessional. “Tina, my
child,” I intoned in my best clerical bass,
“tell me: what things lurk within your
heart of hearts?” Her eyes were huge as
she emerged from the booth. I felt pretty
chastened myself and resolved to be more
careful what tricks I played.
“Wish I had a daughter like that,”
declared the greengrocer at Kupsch’s
market, where Suzy did her shopping. To
this point Christa’s thoughts and mine had
been largely taken up with one another.
Possibly some pattern laid up in heaven was
now about to disclose itself? That a “particular
child shall be begotten is, although
unknown to the parties concerned, the
true end of the whole love story”: thus
Schopenhauer in “The Metaphysics of the
Love of the Sexes.”
* * *
Ernst Häublein had defended his dissertation
on Sir Philip Sidney, done under
Professor Schneewind’s direction, the
previous spring. Now he was beginning
work, also under her supervision, on his
Habilitation. The Habilitation consists of a
row of hurdles, chief among them publication
of a scholarly book, intended to
qualify the academic journeyman for what
in our terms would be an associate professorship.
It parallels our tenure process,
but with this crucial difference: successful
completion of the Habilitation does not
guarantee the candidate a position either
at his home institution or at any other. He
winds up with little more than a hunting
license in his hands. Openings in the upper
ranks of English faculties in Germany had
been plentiful in the 1960s, there as here a
decade of expansion; the ’70s were much
leaner. With Gunhild Schneewind as
Ernst’s director, calamity loomed.
One evening Ernst, Christa, and I
(Suzy was pregnant and abstaining) were
drinking not one of those aristocratic
Franconian wines the Häubleins usually
served but an Austrian red with a bouquet
like paint thinner that Ernst had picked
up on sale. It gave me a fierce headache
and loosened my tongue. “Ernst,” I said,
“Guni will sink you. She may love you like
a son, but she doesn’t have the clout to help
you land a decent job.” I paused and gave
him an earnest look. “For God’s sake, get
your buns out of here!” Christa was the
designated driver that night. She claimed
that when we reached home, I threw the
garage door up, grandly waved her in, and
later, once we were in bed, lapsed into
glossolalia. My recollection is sufficiently
hazy that I can’t really dispute her account.
For weeks afterwards Tina went around
chanting “get your bunnies out of here.”
It required four years for Ernst, who
eventually opted to teach English and
Latin in a Gymnasium, to extricate himself
from Frau Schneewind’s clutches. That was
also the interval it took for our first child
to enter our lives. We named our lovely,
spirited, winsome little girl Catherine
and at home called her by the East Prussian
diminutive Tinka. The glissando from
Tina to Tinka was natural, although I’m
not sure we were conscious of it at the time.
Once Tinka was here she seemed always to
have been implicit in our being together.
Evidently she grasped that herself. When
she was three or so, she declared that even
while she was in her mother’s womb she
had observed our doingsâthrough Christa’s
belly-button.
* * *
You couldn’t have a better guide to WĂźrzburg
than Ernst. Early on in our friendship
he gave us the tour, starting at the Alte MainbrĂźcke.
The bridge, begun in the fifteenth
century, is adorned with twelve sandstone
saints, among them the Irish missionaries
Kilian, Colman, and Totnan, who late in
the seventh century brought Christianity
to the Franks. Kilian’s signal success came
when he converted the local duke, Gozbert.
It happened that Gozbert was married to
his brother’s widow, Geilanaâper church
law at the time, incest. After Kilian had
persuaded the duke to separate from her,
she plotted revenge. The duchess ordered
her cook and the warden of the castle to
decapitate the apostle and for good measure
Colman and Totnan as well, thereby laying
the groundwork for the three Irishmen’s
canonization. For her role in precipitating
their martyrdom, Geilana was possessed
by a demonâmay indeed have been so all
along.
Elsewhere this tale might be served up
as an anecdote to entertain the tourists. In
Franconia the natives not merely remember
the story but relive it. St. Kilian’s feast
is celebrated on July 8th with devotions
in the cathedral that bears his name and
with less sanctified rituals down by the
river involving rides, oompah bands, and
of course a sufficiency of wine. The two
strands of observance are not so far apart
as they would be in a land with a puritan
inheritance. A Franconian proverb has it
that drinking wine is a form of prayerâ
or can be, so long as the vintage is good
and the quantity sensible. Excess counts
as blasphemy. Unless perhaps you need a
lubricant to ease your speaking a difficult
word to a friend.
Our next stop was the Marienkapelle, a
Gothic jewel of a church abutting the city’s
market square. We paused to inspect a
relief over the north portal that depicts the
archangel Gabriel informing Mary of her
blessed conditionâthe verse scrolls forth
from himâand above them the Father,
perched on his throne amid seraphim. The
two groups are joined by a distillation of
the divine breath in the form of a tube that
emerges from His mouth and spirals gracefully
downward till it reaches the Virgin’s
left ear. “You’ve observed the little Jesus?”
inquired Ernst. Actually I hadn’t till he
asked, at which moment I noticed the
infant pneuma chuting down the tube.
The iconography struck me as both droll
and brilliant: how else should Mary receive
the Word if not aurally? It could only have
been the product of what the Rhenish
philosopher Peter Wustâand after him,
more famously, Paul Ricoeurâcalled the
second naĂŻvetĂŠ, an approach to religious
experience that pivots on an imaginative
grasp of symbol and story. Now when I
teach Yeats’s poem “The Mother of God,”
with its image of a flare falling through “the
hollow of an ear,” I pass a postcard reproduction
of the Annunciation tympanum
around the room, not forgetting to offer a
grateful footnote to Ernst.
Two early works in sandstone by Tilman
Riemenschneider, a nude Adam and Eve,
bracket the south portal of the Marienkapelle;
these days they’re replicas, but in
1971 we were still looking at the originals
(now in the Mainfränkisches Museum).
You’ll find Riemenschneider sculptures,
most of them carved from limewood, in
churches all over Franconia, and of course
in museums there and elsewhere too;
for myself, I prefer to view them in the
settings for which they were designed. The
great Altar of the Holy Blood in St. James’s
Church in Rothenburg ob der Tauberâ
especially its side panels depicting Christ’s
entry into Jerusalem and his anguish on
the Mount of Olivesâmight make even
a hardened skeptic reconsider. Who better
than a Franconian woodcarver to render
the son of a carpenter? It is easy to believe
that the artist’s Jesus and his retinue have
been fashioned in the image and likeness
of God; it’s also true that they have those
same high-cheekboned Frankish faces you
can see any day on the WĂźrzburg market
square.
Ernst’s tour went on to include the
romanesque cathedral, the Baroque episcopal
Residenz, and much else besides, but
you’ll have gotten the idea: all the strata
of Middle European history are on display
here.
* * *
The Residenz boasts a grand staircase,
perhaps the architect Balthasar Neumann’s
greatest triumph and on the vaulted ceiling
above that staircase an enormous fresco
with trompe l’oeil elements by the Venetian
master Giovanni Tiepolo. But in a way
the staircase and the fresco are among the
few features of WĂźrzburg’s historic center
that are not trompe l’oeil. On the night of
March 16, 1945, a squadron of B-24’s from
the RAF Bomber Command came in low
over the dome of the Spessart, pulled up
sharply as they approached WĂźrzburg, and
loosed their payloads on the city. A firestorm
ensued; when it subsided close to
ninety per cent of WĂźrzburg’s core lay in
ruins. Of the Residenz, only the magnifi-
cent staircase with its Tiepolo remained
intact; of the Marienkapelle, just the tower.
We got a sense of what it was like to live
through the bombardment when, after our
return to California, we spoke with the
wife of our baker in Pacific Palisades, who
had, as a sixteen-year-old fleeing before the
Red Army, been caught in the WĂźrzburg
train station that dreadful March night. She
recalled the residents of the town as stoical
in the face of catastrophe and generous in
their efforts to assist refugees like herself.
The WĂźrzburgers tried to make sense of
the devastation wrought upon their city by
supposing that the British were exacting
retribution for Coventry. Except for the
railyard and the bridges across the Main,
there were no targets of military signifi-
cance, none certainly that could justify the
carpet bombing to which WĂźrzburg had
been subjected.
The WĂźrzburg we encountered was a
phoenix, sprung from the ashes of 1945.
Trompe l’oeil? Possibly. But at the same time
authentic. WĂźrzburg is a city over which
successive waves of historyâthe Black
Death, the Peasant Revolt, the Thirty
Years War, other wars great and smallâ
have reared up and broken and which has
emerged each time with its head to the
wind. It matters that the city’s resurrection
did not occur overnight, that its restoration
was a labor of love that lasted more than
twenty years and required a vast expenditure
of capital and human resources to
accomplish. The WĂźrzburgers’ sense of
history is incarnational: starting from
dust and ashes, they had reconstituted
its crucial architectural embodiments.
They see history as both living and to be
livedâLazarus come back to tell us whatever
we have ears to hear. Even sojourners
like ourselves could get caught up in that
spirit.
* * *
Christa and I were riveted as well by
the history unfolding on German television,
which offered detailed coverage of
the Bundestag debate on treaties normalizing
relations with the German Democratic
Republic and the other Eastern bloc
states. The debate concerned, at bottom,
the role that the Federal Republic should
play in regional affairsâwhether it ought
to remain simply a cog in the Western alliance
or become instead the leading force
for rapprochement in central and eastern
Europe. Willy Brandt had worked heroically,
fi rst as foreign minister, then as
chancellor, toward his goal of political
changeâand, in the long run, a deeper
cultural transformationâthat was to begin
with the establishment of diplomatic ties
and the settling of border disputes between
the Bundesrepublik and its Warsaw Pact
neighbors. Brandt’s Eastern policy incited
a storm; no one could be sure whether
the Bundestag would ratify the treaties.
Perhaps in order to give that process a
push, in December 1971 the Nobel jury
awarded Brandt the peace prize.
That, at any rate, was how our landlord
saw the matter. “Ach, these damned Social
Democrats, they stick together,” growled
Herr Blaeser when I congratulated himâ
somewhat disingenuously, for by then I
knew his politicsâon the honor his chancellor
had brought to Germany. “If you
ask me, the man’s a traitor. Too many of
our people fell in Spain while he was down
there pimping for the Popular Front.”
“But, Herr Blaeser,” protested Christa.
“It’s Willy Brandt more than anyone else
who has repaired Germany’s image in the
world. Think of him on his knees at the
monument to the Warsaw ghetto.”
“He should save his genuflections
for God,” said Blaeser, whose eyes had
narrowed to slits.
“And how would any of us know before
whom he was kneeling?” she responded. It
was wonderful to watch Christa, five foot
three and a hundred and twenty pounds,
back that old walrus up the beach.
Herr Blaeser was your garden-variety
Nazi, the kind you find in GĂźnter Grass
novels from The Tin Drum to Crabwalk:
petit bourgeois, threatened by modernity,
in need of a tribe to which he can
belong and, more importantly, from which
othersâcommunists, Jews, immigrants,
you name itâare firmly excluded. He paid
his taxes, didn’t beat his wife or son, blew
a good trumpet and probably did a competent
job of teaching his students to do the
same, was considerate to his tenants, even
when they were a bi-national couple. No
fi end, then. But given the right circumstances,
he represented a danger still, not
so much because he’d persecute anyone
himselfâalthough who knows?âas
because he would enable those who did.
* * *
Whenever the world was too much
with us, we’d take refuge in anticipations
of the Häubleins’ second child, whose
advent was slated for the beginning of July.
A couple of weeks before the due date,
the phone rang. Suzy was in labor. Could
we take Tina? Of course. But that proved
more complicated than we’d supposed.
She missed her mama, and she sensed that
something profound was about to shake
her world. Tears. Tears by the liter. Tears
by the vat. We tried getting her to sing her
favorite song, the one about the snowflake
making the hard choice to leave its home
in the clouds for an uncertain future below.
What about a story? “I’ll eat you,” said the
fox to the gingerbread man. Still inconsolable.
But the story of the gingerbread
man gave me an idea. “Tini, how would
you feel about some milk and cookies,” I
asked, “or maybe an ice cream cone?” A
cone? Strawberry? That bought us half an
hour’s quasi-peace. Two days later she got
to go to the hospital to visit her mother
and her new little sister, Renata. Actually
they’re quite interesting, little sisters, she
decided. As interesting as Beata, her doll,
although not of course in the same league
as her ethereal friend, Markus. Her heart
would always belong to Markus.
* * *
Thirty-seven years have passed since our
time in WĂźrzburg. The wisdom of Willy
Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which opened the first
fi ssures in the Soviet imperium, has been
borne out by a string of developments: the
Helsinki accords, the breaching of the Wall
and reunification, the enlargement of the
EU to include the former satellite states.
In 1979 our second daughter, Anna,
was born. She bears a striking resemblance
to Christaâthe same facial bones, hazel
eyes, and fair complexion, with a dusting
of freckles across the nose in summer.
The psychic affinity between mother
and daughter is uncanny. They’re both
generous, strong-willed, intuitive, sensitive
to impressions other people miss, and
scrupulously honest. Thus I find myself
loving each of them not only for herself but
for the image of the other she embodies.
From time to time we revisit WĂźrzburg,
which remains as appealing as
ever. We show our daughters the places
that mattered to us when Christa and I
were the age they are now. The new/old
monuments have acquired something of a
patina, thanks to pollution. Ulrich Blaeser
and Gunhild Schneewind have been dead
for more than twenty years. The Mainfränkisches
Museum offers me a geezer
discount, and I envision myself sitting on
a bench somewhere, tracing overlapping
circles in the dust.
Whither, alas, have all my years fled?
Have I dreamed my life . . . ?
The lines are from the thirteenth-century
master Walther von der Vogelweide, whose
bones lie in the churchyard of WĂźrzburg’s
NeumĂźnsterâa better place than most to
contemplate final things.
The Germans have pretty much given
up on going to church. They don’t bother
with formalities like marriage either.
Important exception: Tina has sacrificed
the spectral Markus and wedded the soulful
but distinctly incarnate Peter.
We’re still good friends with the
Häubleins. Ernst has retired from his job as
principal of the Humboldt Gymnasium in
Schweinfurt, the largest secondary school
in Franconia. The four of us are planning
a get-away at the Lago di Lugano next
spring, before the tourist horde descends.
Several weeks ago Suzy phoned to discuss
arrangements. After we’d finished talking
about the Lugano trip, she shared this
piece of news: “Tina and Peter will be
moving to the U. S. He’s taken a job at the
German School of New York. Naturally
they’re excited, although the timing is
awkward; he has to be there by the middle
of August.” Awkward? “Yes,” she went on,
her tone implying that this was something
we should have known, “Tina is expecting
that month.”
Tina is expecting? Saints Kilian, Colman,
and Totnan, pray for her. Mother Mary, be
with her now and at the hour she brings
forth new life. All you holy people, pray
for Tinka and Anna. Pray for us all.