Chapter 2 Oat Hangover
OAT HANGOVER
“How are you feeling, Oma?” my granddaughter Alix asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just as I was fine thirty minutes ago, and when we boarded the train at Frankfurt. When I’m not fine, I’ll tell you.”
“Awesome answer,” Ben said. Ben is the nephew of Alix’s fiancé, Sebastian Robillard, and lives with him and Alix in Portland.
Sebastian, I was in perfect charity with.
Sebastian, with Ben’s help, had carted bags between car and airport, plane and hotel, hotel and train and off again, with a welcome lack of fuss, and had fetched everything that needed fetching.
Beyond that? He’d let me ask him for help, if I needed it.
Growing old is odd, perhaps odder because I never saw my parents grow old or heard how they felt about it.
They quite likely wouldn’t have said—complaining is not something a Saxon royal is permitted—but I’d have sensed it in them, perhaps seen my mother sigh as she plucked a chin hair.
Facial hair, I’ve always thought, is God’s joke on elderly women.
Just when your skin is losing its elasticity and your face its bloom—and just when you can’t see well enough to spot all of them—those wiry, stubborn hairs appear out of nowhere, springing up overnight like mushrooms to add their final insult.
One may as well be a farmer, so much cultivation is required.
Inside, I still feel—not twenty-one, perhaps.
Thirty-five is more accurate. Settled in myself, the silly anxieties of my twenties gone.
My mind seems no different to me otherwise, which sometimes makes the reality of being ninety-four appear a cruel joke.
Two weeks ago, I’d been in my favorite shop in Palo Alto, buying new trousers and shoes for this trip—isn’t it a blessing that women can wear trousers now?
Trousers that don’t need ironing, too. Knitwear.
Perma-pressed. How those words had made my heart sing, back when there weren’t enough hours in the day.
Wait, I was thinking about the shop. One’s mind does wander, although that may have been because I wasn’t ready to take in Dresden yet, and because of the enormity of what I’d come here to do.
So. The shop. I’d been at the sale rack, examining my choices—saving money still delights me, like any petit bourgeois; my mother would be horrified—when I’d caught movement out of the corner of my eye.
An ancient woman dressed in black, her back beginning to hump a bit, looking like a Greek widow.
I’d thought, I’m glad I still have my posture.
That was the moment I realized that, first, it was a mirror, and second, the Greek widow with the dowager’s hump was me.
I suppose there are actually two alternate “me’s” in my mind.
That thirty-five-year-old career woman, wife, and mother, running all the aspects of her family’s life with competence and, I like to think, grace, and the sixty-five-year-old one, her hair turned to silver but her complexion still surprisingly smooth, her body still surprisingly energetic, working in the garden, then dressing for an evening at the San Francisco Opera, the Ballet, the Symphony, anywhere Joe and I can slake our thirst for music.
Still able, with enough of that cultivation, to look beautiful in an austere sort of way, at least to a husband with imperfect vision.
Ah, those evenings, especially when they were playing Mozart or Pachelbel.
Mozart, because the sun seemed to shine from his music, or perhaps it was the joie de vivre of Vienna, that most civilized of capitals.
And Pachelbel because to me, Pachelbel would always be Nuremberg.
Pachelbel’s home, and the city where I’d first heard Joe play the Canon and Fugue in D Major on a battered cello that had come through the war the way so many of us had—worse for wear, but still standing.
Wagner, with his hysterical romanticism and the brutalist mythology so beloved of Hitler?
No, I’d had enough of Wagner; and Beethoven, too, was at times too martial for my taste.
It was The Magic Flute I loved best and the Ring series that I let pass me by, and it was Bach I drifted off to sleep with these days, Bach who kept me company most during the long days alone.
Baroque like Dresden. Clever, intellectual, restrained, the emotion controlled but there for those who chose to listen. Like, perhaps, Joe, and also me.
I’d drifted again. I was standing in the main hall of the Dresden Hauptbahnhof, the main railway station, which looked completely different after nearly eighty years and yet much the same.
My mind was still trying to escape, but minds tend to need a bit of time to get used to a new reality.
Today, there were no three hundred thousand hungry, desperate refugees packed into the tunnels and caverns below, no hurrying, threadbare civilians looking away from the plain-clothes Gestapo, recognizable for being better fed than anyone else, and from the SS, with their terrifying black uniforms and the lightning bolts on their lapels.
The SS and Gestapo never looked away. They looked.
Today, there were no police in sight, and the floor was as sparklingly clean as it had been when I was a little girl, before it all went wrong.
Not American clean, but German Hausfrau clean, in a country where not washing your front steps might as well still be a crime, if only a social one these days.
The vast glass dome soared intact once more, its delicate metal tracery making the structure look fine as gossamer.
The outer walls, when I could see them, would still be sandstone, darkened by time and weathering.
All of it the same, as if none of it had happened, and yet so different.
Sebastian said, “Ben and I will take the bags and pick up the rental car, and Alix can stay with you, Marguerite. You should sit and have a coffee, if you like. Kaffee und Kuchen in the afternoon, right?”
I do love a masterful man. I’m sure that shows my age and my upbringing, but a woman can’t change her nature. I said, “Thank you; that will be fine.”
Ben said, “How about if I stay with you instead, Tante Marguerite? I’m saying that because Alix looks like she’s about to burst out with something like, ‘I’ve been doing these online German lessons for months, though!
I want to pick up the car! Saying, “Ein Kaffee, bitte,” isn’t going to get me any further along at all.
’” He added, of course, “Plus, I’m hungry.
That curry sausage thing on the train was pretty good, but that was hours ago. ”
“It was two hours ago,” Sebastian said.
“Like I said,” Ben said. “Hours. You can leave some of the bags, though, and I’ll bring them out.”
“No worries,” Alix said. “We’ve got the trolley.
All right. I’ll text you when we’ve got the car and are heading over.
It looks like we can pick you up outside the main entrance, if you go outside and turn right.
There’ll be red lines on the pavement marking the pickup area, and the sign will say something like Anstehen.
If you get confused, you can ask a porter, or you can—”
“I don’t have to know all of that,” Ben said. “Tante Marguerite can read the signs, and I can figure out the rest. I’m not nine.”
Alix hesitated a moment, then said, “Fine. Oh—do you want me to help you find a café first?”
Ben leaned forward and struck his forehead with his palm twice, which made me laugh. “No,” he said. “I’m fifteen, and Tante Marguerite is probably old enough to find a café by herself too. Go. Leave.”
“I open my mouth,” Alix said, “and my mother comes out. I can’t believe it. Save me, Sebastian.”
“You’ve got it,” he said. “Let’s go.” And shoved off with his mountain of luggage—a good third of which, I’m sorry to say, was mine—stowed on the cart.
Sebastian was a good loader, too. Alix would have thrown all of it on there in a hurry, and half our bags would have slid off by now.
I wasn’t going to remark on that, but I could still think it.
“Finally,” Ben said when they’d gone. “Except that I realize I don’t actually know where the café is, and I’m not supposed to drag you all over and wear you out.
That’s the big concern, if you want to know, that we’ll wear you out.
Alix is going to ask a hundred times. You should probably work out a hand signal with her so you don’t lose it and kill her the forty-second time she does it.
Hang on, I’m looking up the café thing.”
“Over there,” I said. “To the right. I’ll take your arm, if I may. I should have worn my walking shoes.”
“How come you didn’t?” Ben asked as we headed through the well-behaved crowds, queueing as if they’d been born to it, which they had.
“Most people dress worse when they travel, not, like, way better than usual. Oh—if that’s way better than usual for you.
I’ve only seen you at home. It seems fancy to me, anyway. ”
“In my day,” I said, “I would have worn a hat and gloves even to go downtown, and worst of all, stockings and a girdle. How one suffered. Even I, with the physique of a starving bird, had to wear the girdle, because to do otherwise would have been shockingly immodest. Girdles, hats, gloves, and dresses that had to be ironed. How much of life was consumed by all of that, especially without a maid or modern appliances.”
“What’s a girdle?” Ben asked.
“Goodness,” I said, “you don’t know? American women are surprisingly prudish, or they used to be.
One had to wear the girdle, but one could never mention the girdle.
It was an elastic undergarment. Usually white, possibly so it could never be thought of as sexual or attractive.
It held in one’s stomach, rear, and thighs, you see, tightly enough for discomfort.
Some women wore a garment that was all things in one: brassiere and girdle.
Most uncomfortable in summer. Your stockings fastened to the straps that hung down from the girdle. ”
“Like a garter belt?” Ben’s eyes had gone bigger. “I’ve heard of that.”
“Not nearly as attractive as that,” I said.
“You can look it up once we’re sitting down, if you like.
Everyone does that now, I’ve noticed. As soon as they sit down, they begin looking things up.
But as to why I dressed a bit more nicely than you think necessary—because one is treated better when one dresses better.
” I touched the ancient gold Hermès silk scarf I’d draped across one shoulder, its vibrant color gleaming against my deep purple jacket, and adjusted my purple handbag on my arm.
“And it’s nice to have something to dress up for, isn’t it? ”
“I guess,” Ben said, extremely doubtfully. “Except people don’t care that much how you dress. Wouldn’t that be, like, really shallow?”
“Possibly shallow,” I said, “and also real, especially as an American in, say, Germany. One does not dress for the beach or for a hiking trip in the mountains when one is in the city, unless Europe has altered completely. Ah. Here we are. This will be fine. There’s an empty table there, in the corner. ”
Ben read the sign. “Haferkater. Is that, like, bakery?”
“No,” I said. “It means ‘Oat Hangover.’ I suspect they specialize in oats.”
“A restaurant for oatmeal,” Ben said. “That’s horrible.
Why? Who says, ‘You know what I feel like going out for today? Oatmeal!’” He steered me toward the table, though, and I sat down gratefully.
I definitely should have worn the ugly walking shoes, the ones that screamed “Old lady!” and offended my every sensibility.
I’d bought them exactly for moments like this, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to wear them.
Sebastian would be hauling those ugly shoes through half of Dresden, but then, that was probably good football conditioning. I wasn’t going to worry about it.
“Go pick up a menu,” I said, “and I’ll translate for you so you can order for us at the counter. Say, ‘Die Speisekarte, bitte’ for the menu.”
“Everybody on the train spoke English, it seemed like,” Ben said. “Won’t they speak it here too?”
“Yes,” I said, “if you prefer to be an American tourist who doesn’t bother even to learn to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ because you believe the United States rules over all. An attitude that was not so popular in Germany, the last time I was here.”
“I was just asking,” Ben said. “Also, I’m Canadian. OK, tell me how to say the menu thing again. But I’m still not excited about oats.”
“There will likely be an option with chocolate,” I said. “In Germany, there’s always an option with chocolate. Oats, Nutella, and banana seem likely. Go and see.”