The freezer makes a squeaky sound when opened this late at night. And the cork in the bottle with flying french birds on it is not very quiet either. The glass should be far too cold to touch with lips, but it is not. And the liquid inside feels almost as if it were snow, at first, and then it just glows nicely and in a very clean way.
Forget the weekend. Now.
It was a good one, actually. I slept more in the two days or so than all of last week I guess. And it was a quiet sleep, packed with adventures and dreams involving owners of delicatessen playing the roles of art experts. My old Russian and English teacher even came forward as a life long artist painter, his back room of his tiny Florentine apartment packed with orange paintings much more vibrant than what Richter showed us at the Biennale in 2000.
Oh, and there were the coffe cups, some really stunning designs. Who knew such things could be printed on paper.
And a mail on friday (or was it Thursday?) reminded me that I really wanted to dive deeper into the two little leather bound books containing the Grimm’s fairy tales (sans filtre, mind you,) the very stories that might be the origin of the word grim. Yes, grim they are indeed, and in no way as cute as uncle Walt wanted us to believe. Death is a brutal and inventive force in them, and sometimes it even does not arrive in person at the end of the story, it just sends a long shadow, just long enough to remind us of our own finite calendars.
“Each day is a day less to live.” My father has much better quotes in his collection, but this one was a fitting one for the day when I did not call. Oh, it was father’s day, but only here in the US… the capital version of you and I.. the US… there could probably be just two countries now, the US and the they. At least according to some, who never had to be the “they” in their lives.
Oh, the Grimm brothers. Yes. I would take the number three bus on Freiheitsplatz every weekday (Freiheitsplatz is “Freedom’s square” in Hanau.)
The bus stop of the number 3 line had a little plaque where I waited. It was a reminder that this there was the place where the house used to be in which the Grimm Brothers were born. Right there. Yes.
The house, as 98% of Hanau was destroyed, when somebody was dumb enough to declare that Hanau was a “fortress.”
Well, two airplanes were stationed there, not actually even there. The US planes left the 2% or so standing, which happened to be the Casernes… (is this the spelling for military quarters?)
So the Americans had a place to stay, aster they eventually liberated the city.
The house in which the Police and the Gestapo used to be was turned into the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service, the Grimm House was turned into a bus stop… and the Synagogue was turned into a Car Body Shop for russian automobiles of the brand “Lada”…
I would walk over the fields in the west of the city in the 80’s and my dog would dig out the strangest things. Parts of dolls, little colorful bottles, pieces of ceramics. My parents have a recreational garden on that field these days. The food grows really well there…
Hmm… enough of all this now… I will read some more of the Grimm Brother tales… hmm… I wonder why there was never a Disney version of “Das Mädchen ohne Hände.” (“The Girl without hands.”)…
(Oh, she has them in the beginning of the story, it is the father who cuts, them off, as he promised to the devil, you know…)
Maybe this is the perfect time to open that squeaky door again. What did it taste like?… like melting snow? Oh, the beauty of things that happen without words…