Then I remembered to take out the factory-made bread she had asked me for on the phone. I must admit that this request had puzzled me. I had to go around to several stores until I could find ordinary factory-made bread in Bulgaria. Who even buys it anymore? Hilde carefully took the bread, she was evidently deeply moved, and went out into the hallway so I couldn’t see her. She returned a short while later and said that she remembered the taste of that bread from her childhood. She cut three slices, sprinkled them with a little salt, and handed one to me and one to my wife. I’ve never seen anyone savor more a slice of simple factory-made bread with salt.
After that she took us to the kitchen and showed us something very special. She opened up the lower compartment in the sideboard and took a pot out from way in the back. It was an enormous, heavy pot, fashioned from rough, solid metal. As if tanks had been melted to cast it, I thought then and even said it aloud. Hilde smiled and said that I had no idea how right I was. This pot was the first and most valuable thing the devastated German state had given out to families. One big cooking pot apiece made of melted-down weapons and munitions. We survived thanks to this pot, Hilde said, you could even boil stones in it.
And I imagined the young Hilde amid the devastation of the ’40s and ’50s in Germany, clearing away the ruins alongside the other women, searching for whole bricks, building, sewing clothes for her brother, waiting for a few potatoes, sitting in the dark to save electricity. Without complaining, like a person whose lot it was to rebuild a nation that had been razed to its foundations.
We sat in her humble apartment and I thought that someday I must tell the story of Hilde, who, without even realizing it, rebuilt Germany. With a heavy, beat-up cast-iron pot and the memory of a slice of factory-made bread with salt.
26.
Gradually Gaustine’s clinic found its fans. Over several years rooms and houses of the past began popping up in various places. In Aarhus, for example, they used an ethnographic village made of old-fashioned houses to show schoolchildren and tourists how their forefathers had lived, how they had raised geese, sheep, goats, and horses. The geese, sheep, goats, and horses were not from the nineteenth century.
This piqued my curiosity, so, using a literary festival in Denmark as an excuse, I went a few days early and took a train to Aarhus. I had asked a Danish friend of mine to call in advance to let them know that as a writer or journalist I was interested in this social project, and so on. Clearly she went above and beyond the call of duty, because when I got there a pleasant young woman was waiting to show me around.
Actually, this place didn’t have much in common with Gaustine’s clinic. It was a museum like any other museum, but twice a month they closed a bit earlier to the general public and in the remaining hours welcomed groups from retirement homes, primarily those suffering from dementia. Some of these men and women, depending on their strength and their memories, would go into the farmsteads, feed the ducks and goats, water the gardens, or sun themselves in the yards. There were also others for whom such activities meant nothing, who had no memories of village life and farming. Those they would take directly to an apartment preserved just as it had been in 1974. I liked that bit with the exact year, although it wasn’t clear whether this apartment hadn’t been the same in both 1973 and the following year, 1975. It’s doubtful that the kitchen table, the refrigerator, and the upholstered couch in the living room would fade in one year like tulips. I snarkily pointed this out to my guide, of course.
The young woman was pleasant. She calmly and in that typically northern way put up with my suspicions, questions, and direct, typically southern jokes. In the apartment, the women headed straight for the kitchen, she said. As if switching on some hidden compass. These women who found it difficult to navigate their own apartments, here instinctively knew their way around—a conditioned reflex that had transformed into instinct. They were attracted by the scent of the spices and would open up jars of basil, cloves, mint, rosemary, burying their noses inside, no longer remembering the names, mixing them up, but knowing what was what.
They set off after the now-lost scent of freshly ground coffee, the girl went on, we have stockpiles of the exact kinds that were popular during the fifties and sixties. They like to grind it themselves. They often keep turning the handle of the grinder after the coffee is ground.
I thought of how the recollection of scents is the last to leave the empty den of memory. Perhaps because it is an earlier sense, so for that reason it is the last to go, departing like a little beast, sniffing with its head to the ground. I clearly pictured those women eternally turning the handles of square wooden coffee grinders or the tall cylindrical ones of tarnished silver with copper handles. It should be a scene from the seventeenth century, worthy of the brush of those old Dutchmen Vermeer, Hals, and Rembrandt, detailed realism and sublime everyday life rolled into one. The endless spinning of a coffee grinder, the scent which you imbibe with your nose, some things don’t change over the centuries. I imagined them grinding up the years, the seasons, the days, and the hours like coffee beans. When they turn the handles of these coffee grinders, the Girl with a Pearl Earring (that’s what I called my guide, who introduced herself as Lotte) said, it’s like they really go into a different time. We also have a library with books from the sixties and seventies, but letters no longer mean anything to most of them. Sometimes they look at the children’s books, enjoying the pictures and that’s it.
Actually, it turns out that right at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Dutchman, Pieter van den Broecke, managed to transport several coffee seeds across the seas to raise the first plants in Europe. His successor was none other than Carl Linnaeus, who was enchanted by these bushes and took over their care. And Linnaeus himself in his old age also began to suffer from progressive memory loss. He who had given names to the world, who had ordered and classified the unorderable, suddenly began to forget exactly those names. I can imagine him sitting over some forget-me-not and trying to remember the Latin name that he himself had given it.
We strolled past the houses from different eras, stopped into the post office from the 1920s to note the end of an entire industry of anticipation, of the delayed gratification of messages that traveled for days. We crossed paths with noblemen from bygone centuries, with milkmen, with shepherds without sheep, we nodded at the shoemakers sitting in front of their shops, in one spot kids in shorts, suspenders, and flat caps were playing leapfrog, and at an intersection a beggar had meekly laid out his torn hat. Most of them are volunteers, my guide noted, or history students or retirees. They don’t get paid anything, yet more and more turn up every year. Sometimes homeless people come as well. And what do they dress up as? I livened up at this idea. We give them warm, clean clothes from a certain epoch. But most of them don’t want to change their clothes. They want to stay as they are. And as they themselves say, there’ve always been vagrants, right, what century do you need us for?
And they’re right, of course, I think afterward. The homeless have no history, they are . . . how shall I put it, extra-historical, unbelonging. To a certain extent, that is what Gaustine was, too.
Finally we sat down in the most popular chain pastry shop from the ’70s, where they made their cakes, meringues, and croissants from scratch with flour, vanilla, lemon rind, cinnamon, and all the other ingredients from that time, using cake molds and icing from back then, as Lotte emphasized. We sat there and drank some brand of hot chocolate that had been popular in its day, from porcelain cups with a gold rim. The waitresses of the ’70s whirled past us, and there was something very familiar about them which sent me back—one of my first almost erotic memories was connected with those high white shoes that came up over the ankle.