Books & Dreams

Seventy candles do strange things to a family. They burn late, and they leave a soft smoke of memory hanging over the morning after. Yet I woke clear-headed and oddly light, as if the party had shaken something loose rather than weighed me down. I showered, dressed, and began the slow surrender of our room, folding shirts back into cases that seem to have grown smaller with every country we have crossed. By a quarter past eight I was downstairs, alone, guarding a long table like a sentry, for I knew who would come.

They came as I knew they would, one by one, the brothers and their wives, each entering with that careful dignity people adopt after a late night. Five boys from Berlebeck, grown grey, still recognisable to one another by a gesture, a laugh, the way a cup is lifted. We sat over breakfast far longer than breakfast deserves. Nobody hurried. When a family has been scattered across decades and borders, a second pot of coffee becomes a kind of resistance against departure.

But departure came all the same. The cases went down, the car swallowed them with a familiar groan, and we drove the few kilometres to W.’s house for a last hour together. Farewells after a great celebration have their own quiet choreography: the lingering at the gate, the one more thing that must still be said, the wave through the back window. Then the roads divided, and each of us went home.

Home, for me, is a word with several addresses. One of them lies in Lippe, and so we turned south-west towards Detmold, 230 kilometres that slipped by in barely two and a half hours without a single stop. As the Teutoburg Forest rose on the horizon I felt that old, involuntary tug. Berlebeck lies just beyond the town, where the hills begin, and every return here is a little like opening a book I first read as a boy, finding the pages unchanged and the reader much altered.

Just before two we drew up at the Detmolder Hof. I have slept under this roof more often than I can count, and it remains one of the most curious hotels I know. On a Sunday it serves its guests breakfast, and then, with the unhurried logic of a provincial town, it simply closes. The staff go home. The doors are locked. Whoever remains is given a key and left to inhabit the old house alone, like lodgers in a novel by Fontane, padding through silent corridors where the only sound is the creak of the stairs.

We had arrived at the very moment of closing. The room was not ready, and the reception desk stood empty until I raised my voice to the rafters and someone emerged, a little surprised, from the back. Part of our luggage was taken in, and we went out into the town to wait.

There is only one place to wait in Detmold, as far as I am concerned, and that is the Grabbe Café. It stands in the very house where Christian Dietrich Grabbe died, the town’s wild, unhappy genius, who wrote dramas too large for any stage of his time and was worn out at thirty-four. I have always found it strangely fitting that the rooms where his restless life came to its end now offer coffee and cake, the gentlest of consolations. I had both; Julie had peppermint tea. We gave the room half an hour and a little more, and let the town drift past the window.

When we returned, the Detmolder Hof had sealed itself completely, shut as a closed book. Our key turned in the side door, the house let us in, and upstairs we found the room made up and quiet. The rest of the luggage followed, and then the afternoon divided itself as our afternoons so often do: I lay down for my sacred nap, while Julie, five days deprived of water, went to the public pool and swam her kilometre and more, length after steady length, as other people pray.

Evening brought a craving for India, and we found our way to Taste of India shortly before six. On Sundays it is open all day, and it was full, every table taken or promised. But a promise of our own, a main course only, no lingering, won us a corner. Julie ordered gambas. I ordered chicken vindaloo, that fierce dish the Portuguese carried to Goa as carne de vinha d’alhos, meat in wine and garlic, and which India returned to the world blazing with chilli and vinegar.

What came to the table had travelled rather further. Julie’s prawns looked as though they had taken a wrong turn somewhere east of Calcutta and ended up in Canton; she pronounced them good, but Chinese. My vindaloo had forgotten its ancestry altogether. No vinegar, no heat, no garlic worth the name, only a mild and courteous sauce of no particular origin. It was perfectly pleasant. It was simply not what it claimed to be, and I ate it with the mild melancholy of a man who has been introduced to a stranger under an old friend’s name.

So we paid and crossed to the Brauhaus, where nothing is ever pretending to be anything else. It is one of our true locals in Detmold, and Danny, the barman, saw us before we had shut the door. He came round the bar with his arms already open; it had been too long, and the embrace said so. Our table was waiting. Later my brother R. arrived with his wife and grandchild Tom and then K. came in with his son Andreas and the evening, which had begun as a quiet supper for two, quietly became one more chapter of the family gathering that has been running, in one form or another, since Friday.

In time the little one was taken home and Julie went back to the hotel, and I stayed on with the lads for a short ramble through the town, through streets I knew long before I knew any other. Still, I was back in our room by a quarter past twelve, turning the key in a sleeping house. Our second-to-last day was over. Tomorrow the road runs home to Trier and Luxembourg, and this long journey will begin to become a memory.