Retro Chic in Ederthal

For a few months now, the conspirators have had a new spot. In the Heaven & Hell Bar you sit at kidney-shaped tables. The wallpaper shows South Sea motifs that also conjure up Fiddler on the Roof. The arts and crafts fuse Gauguin with Chagall according to an extremely obsolete concept of décor. The surroundings have a stimulating effect on the academic staff of Landgrave Philipp University, who, as ever, engage in clique formation in the campus-adjacent dive bars. No one notices the transgenerational redundancy.

At the counter, a striking representative of that clan holds court — the clan that has provided the mayor of Ederthal for decades. By now, already in the third generation, it is a mayoress. Ansgar Gerster is an uncle of the current office holder, Atlanta Gerster-Mansfeld. Down to his fingertips proficient in all aspects of his trade, shrewd, jovial, hands-on, the wholesale meat dealer is — of all people — seeking heightened interest in him from Nana.

Nana in her own words

I am a creature of this region, born and raised in Ederthal. My mother and Ansgar are the same age. Right now he is telling how, in the glorious days of the Cold War, he flew from Berlin-Schönefeld on an Ilyushin 18 to Burgas in Bulgaria, both to relax and to spy. The Riviera of the GDR citizens lies on the Black Sea. Ansgar explored the Bulgarian-Greek border line. In the Turkish territories he surveyed the situation. They tortured him with slices of melon and rakı. Mixed with water, the anise liquor floats on the palate as aslan sütü — lion’s milk. Ansgar fell into a moonstruck state and forgot his mission in a drunken haze beneath awnings. His informant looked like a scarecrow. The goblin invited Ansgar to the ritual slaughter of a ram. The animal bled out on a Bulgarian alpine pasture.

Ansgar met the Dane Lars, a magnificently battered figure as if from the days of the Danish West Indies. Lars played the shipwrecked captain with terrible cargo-hold secrets. To Bella Ciao he served kebapcheta and kyufte. Kyufte are meatballs or patties, originally boulettes, as Berliners in the Mark Brandenburg call the French field-kitchen innovation. For digestion, a Pyrus communis distillate was served. Suddenly three young women appeared. They wore headscarves and were married.

Hours later, the group traveled in a Trabant over muddy roads to the women’s village. Against the night sky, oil derricks stood out like skeletons of prehistoric reptiles. The women wanted to giggle and flirt a bit more before being confined again to their domestic circumstances. Lars did not understand the subtleties of the game; he became intrusive. Ansgar admonished him with his fist.

“The night ended at ten in the morning,” Ansgar recounts comfortably. He misinterprets my stamina. I am not standing here because of him and his stale stories. I am waiting for you. And now you are finally here, only slightly late, although yesterday, still on another continent, you managed the feat of turning my sorrow (over your absence) into pleasure. The sky through which you soon afterward flew toward me then seemed like nothing more than a divine trifle. I fly into your arms. You spin me around. I give you time to reach your longed-for destinations in my eyes. In your eyes I see a fire that must be extinguished immediately.

“Do you have anything left here?” you ask. You have a whole register of variations at your disposal. Command and seduction in a single breath — you can conquer and revere at the same time. Oh, how I love these transitions between professional discussion, training, and erotic expansions of the horizon, which I never have to forgo, because you are so damn hot for me. I was born in a dream of yours. I exceed your expectations and embarrass your sense of reality. I appear to you as you recognize me. I allow you everything in return for the miracle that I may exist for you. You of course allow me everything in return for the miracle that you may exist for me. I could never do that with a man who lacks a sense for the poetry of mutual devotion.

We cross the campus; the lights in the pavilion are just going out. The garden behind it is, at this hour, an enchanted place — a quiet space of withdrawal from the bustle in the forecourts of the university, which was founded in the Middle Ages as a fortified knights’ college. Shall we not, I ask with a glance, go there? It is not only desire, love, and sheer physical pleasure. It is also friendship, reverence, steadfastness of alliance, and the drilling need to let myself be taken by you without preamble.