Chapter 4

I am shopping and at the beach

 

Gerd drives up with the package of unknown contents that Roswitha put in his trunk for Sandy. His destination is his home and it is not even halfway to the summit of the Kuhlung mountain range. It is exactly fifty-four meters above sea level, which he is prepared to climb using his diesel-powered all-rounder car, much to the chagrin of his mother-in-law. He rolls along the gently curving road leading south in an almost imperceptible, rubber-tyred ascent. After many a bend, the Baltic Sea appears in the rear-view mirror. The blue finite, which divides and unites, is the hope of the neighbors and the bone of contention for geopolitical strategists, who on both sides see the Russian bear as friend and foe once again at the gates of Lubeck. It lies where the curvature of the earth shifts the horizon with every centimeter that Gerd climbs; behind the meadows and fields, outside the treetops of the more densely wooded cooler areas at higher altitudes.

‚Come higher to see more? He is not in the mood for geometry, and he tries to avoid a lofty overview of his worries. ‚It’s changed,‘ he thinks, referring to the feeling of going home, which has been associated with warmth for over two and a half decades. Joy, enrichment, relaxation, distraction, lunch, - love, - always worries too. ‚But this?

He drives down the last few kilometers several times a day and on the tour. When he sees the sea without the mirror, the expanse captures him from his nightmares again, fires his senses and grounds his soul. Rarely is he so lost in thought that he ignores the beauty. Driving home is more meaningful in its depth of feeling - and has been fundamentally different lately. Fear of loss. It is not comparable to the opening of the landscape, which together with the vastness of the sea welcome the heart from afar and everything in it seems brighter to him, daily refreshed and carefree chuckling, in the moments he is out and about, like on a magnificent, aimless avenue, always in exactly the right place.

‚Coming home‘. For Gerd, it means meeting his heart. He imagines he can smell it. Not his hollow muscle, but his home. The harmony, the connection that expresses cohesion in phases. Comforting warmth, which he had regarded as the usual basis of his self-image, was initially disturbed at times and increasingly overlaid by burning worries.

‚If only it weren’t for the problems that prevent me from having a clear thought. Gerd’s head is spinning on the spot. ‚Why did the Glowatzs move here back then? There’s nothing here. Were they on the run? Did they have something to hide, just like me?

He distracts himself from horror scenarios with moderate success by pointlessly scrutinizing his surroundings. The fact that everyone in his family is healthy keeps him from impotent madness, leaving him oblivious to the burden that they could lose their idyll.

Before he turns off the road, which is called the main road and no longer has to be called a village street outside of the smallest of villages, he is surrounded by home. He turns into Mill Road, a cul-de-sac whose three residents live on the hillside. The mill that gives the street its name is no longer in operation. Hanna lives there. The fact that he himself runs a quaint oil mill for sea buckthorn kernels nearby is a coincidence and has something to do with the fields he cultivates, which are up to twelve kilometers away, and not historically with the Glowatz family’s mill property.

‚Well, last tour today and off to the garden in Kropelin; cold frames need care‘, he thinks as the freshly washed, postage-yellow car approaches him on the narrow road, its driver swerving sideways onto the beige-brown grass like him. „Hello, have a nice weekend!“ he says almost without a voice, with an exaggerated facial expression and his hand raised in greeting, just like his counterpart. Postal delivery man Thorsten is a devotedly tattooed representative of Generation Z, conspicuous for his friendliness and diligence. His parents and the family of his wife Steffi, who works in a bakery on Beach Road, live in Hollow Born. With every meter you get closer to the water, the cost of the land and the rent increase. Two thousand units would be available. All vacation homes waiting for a dream summer, low fuel costs and horror reports from foreign destinations to fuel the home unchallenged.

The brook, which had been given the obvious name of Mill Brook has been dammed up since the end of the thirteenth century, at the beginning of the Wendish period, and a water mill, no more elaborately built than for this very purpose, has been in operation. His mother-in-law has only lived in the mill building for twenty-three years. Amalie was five, Josephine was two and Sandy was pregnant with Marlene. Hanna loves her family, which does not necessarily go hand in hand with a passion for devoting her entire life to the trivialities of ever new adolescents in a motivated, surprised and enthusiastic way. To call it the retirement home is misleading given the considerable dimensions of the mill, a perpetual building site. The former storage areas and the adjoining smithy, whose hammer mill had also operated the mill wheel, have an excellently clear and solid building fabric and have been preserved and rebuilt over the centuries, which leads to well-plastered gray areas, especially in terms of thermal insulation, which should only be partially argued with monument protection and formal non-use at all. In terms of building law, Hanna lives in a small, listed building surrounded by unheated usable areas that are protected in the ensemble.

Past Karl and Vera Heinenbuttel’s croft, a former smallholding, a hoof that has its own field next to the house. The meadow orchard has been cultivated and added to where the sheep pasture used to be. They have kept five massive-looking animals with gray-black wool, most of which lie between the trees, as well as three goats. They did not build any more and their marriage remained childless. They are at an advanced age, and if the stories are true, Karl has lived in the house longer than the birth dates on his ID card indicate. ‚I’ll ask him on Monday if he needs anything. He doesn’t come of his own accord, but tries without help, fails and leaves it. Out of false pride or unfounded shame. The billy goat stands at the fence and looks at him with frozen eyes in a gaunt, motionless skull. ‚There he is again, my friend. He’s laughing at me, the bastard. Evil look and stern smell.‘ „I’ll send you to the desert, you damned carrion.“

Gerd, a convinced atheist, like many of his acquaintances, some with a tendency towards nationalistic vapors, mostly gives vent to his feelings in a careless manner, which on closer inspection leads to minor contradictions between being and attitude. Past the second house in his street, also a property of a size that would not disturb the neighbors‘ house music, although at least farming did not take place there professionally. Someone had built it where a single vacation hut, a dacha, had previously stood. Nobody talks about which Berlin servant of the people had earned himself a love nest away from marriage and the public eye with a view of the Baltic Sea. He seemed to have loved it; countless times, with changing companions. In his early nineteen nineties, he stayed away. He is said to have set off on an educational trip of indeterminate duration to scenic Patagonia with his wife, who had never been to the vacation home. There are rumors with little speculative content regarding his public service. People do not speak disparagingly about third parties. - He had a charismatic demeanor and was more than just welcoming by nature. After the fall of communism, the house was auctioned off and nobody cared that it was not and is not registered as a vacation home and, judging by its dimensions, looks more like a hunting lodge than a dacha. It is inhabited by the family of the son of the then overjoyed auctioneers, the Melchings from Hanover. The ageing couple now live in a condominium near Marbella in Andalusia. Their only child Soren has two bike stores, one in Rostock and one in Bad Doberan. He also runs a bike rental shop in Hollow Born and Warnowmouth. His wife Dorte, a former racing cyclist from Rostock, is currently at home with their three children. She is looking forward to being on the road more soon, intends to work in the stores again and will organize semi-professional cycling tours, where participants will be grouped according to ability. Dorte, as bike-mad as her husband, pushes her to the limits of her abilities. She will take part in downhill mountain biking in the Alps, as she did before becoming a mother.

The Ballers get on famously with the ‚breadbags‘ next door. The Melching family is a tad too demonstratively vegan by local standards and celebrates their love of nature. Not that anyone would mind; it’s just that the locals‘ enthusiasm for the cause and the implementation of requests come to nothing without the slightest ripple. Regardless of this, they get on really well with each other as neighbors; there is no need to listen to every lecture to the bitter end or to conjure up technical discussions from opinion pieces. There are enough attractions in the landscape to give you the opportunity and legitimacy to let your gaze and thoughts wander in conversation at any time.

‚The Melchings,‘ Gerd lets out in a muffled voice. ‚They’re nice, but the whole family drools when the day is long. All five of them can’t get their act together and one story follows another without the previous one coming to a sensible end... Oh, already there.

There is the driveway to Gerd’s property. He is overcome by a feeling of an embrace whose grip is not intended to support him, but to prevent him from fleeing. It has been built on for centuries. No development plan has defined the type and extent of development with boundaries and distances. Someone intended to live there with his clan, assuming that nothing would come of the settlement. In the Middle Ages, his wife’s ancestors were West Elbian farmers who had been recruited with reason and good words to settle the land. Where they came from, the farms were puny and over the generations no longer had the capacity to feed the increasing number of people. Gerd’s ancestors came from Bad Doberan. They were farmers who managed a fief of the monastery. It is assumed that they originally arrived in the sixth century, as part of the settlement by Slavic families during the migration of peoples.

There are various buildings on the site; a cobbled-together pile of functional units that have emerged and been added to over the years. This is what makes the ensemble so charming. Gerd is an experienced model builder of moving models with and without motors, with and without remote control. Not surprisingly, he has also experimented with flying drones. The camera flyover of the farm with the drone gave the whole family a special feeling of pride and excitement, even and especially the open spaces between the structures, which seem too spacious in the rain and snow. The camera flight encouraged each viewer to recall their own stories with the unspectacular places. A kiss, a fall, a pony, grandma’s chickens, a tree toppled by a storm and a family breakfast on the terrace. To strangers, the farm unashamedly shows the story of its origins, which was not accompanied by wealth, a niche existence, not at the top and not at the bottom, away from covetousness. The main house is not a manor house, and the building with the guest rooms clearly shows that it was once a stable. Over the centuries, no one had bothered to find out what had been built and to what extent it required permission. Nobody came along who was bothered by it.

The tranquillity is a pleasure for the ageing adults in the family. To describe it as the antithesis of the lively seaside resort would not be accurate in the least. On the busiest summer days in the lower section of Hollow Born’s Beach Road, the ‚promenade‘ that is home to half a kilometer of stores and restaurants, tranquillity can be reached in five to ten minutes on foot and even in the center, no one would think of talking about frenzied exuberance.

Surrounded by an untrimmed bend of trees and shrubs of native species, the property does not follow any trend towards nature; it did not need the regional waste disposal service to point out that a species-rich flora is conducive to an intact fauna. The hedge protects against the wind and keeps the livestock, farm animals and dogs, on the property and wild animals reasonably well away from the vegetable garden. The run-in tomcat, who is the size of four shoeboxes, has a lush, thick brindle coat and an equally furry tail, is a free spirit and rejects boundaries. Following the English model of regularly trimming the hedge at nine hundred and fifty meters with hedge trimmers, none of the family has ever had any particular interest in doing so. There is no gate or doorbell on the street side.

‚At harvest time, there is always traffic when we drive the sea buckthorn berries together with the branches on a trailer behind the tractor for freezing. - Until now.‘ Gerd feels the impending emptiness and loneliness, which he is unable to do anything about. Paralyzingly stuck, with no way forward and no way back, he persists, knowing that it will not be enough. A vicious circle builds up - feeding the fire even more. A cause for rebellion, rage and war. Infirmity is a senseless slipping away in delusion, he suspects, which would be a relief in the near future after the time of suffering. Sometimes he comes up with hypocritically self-pitying, factually lying plans for immediate pressure relief, which would finally end all pain. The obstacle is his genes. His wife’s family are sensitive racehorses compared to him. Everything affects and excites them. A thin-skinnedness and vulnerability, coupled with a desire to lash out inimitably with focused energy at what they see as injustice or lack of culture. The Glowatzs do not bed down in the evening next to the pestilence of a tolerated dead rat of unspoken problems. As long as it can be accomplished with work or the destruction of an obstacle, the dismantling of an enemy seems solvable, they do not give up. Paralyzing exhaustion drives them mad. The Ballers are different. In mild self-reflection, they describe their nature as frugal. His mother-in-law, Glowatz pure and simple, does not share this view unreservedly, but describes them as having two truth values, if he wanted to trivialize their sometimes foul-mouthed statements. ‚Greedy but lazy, ignorant but smart-talking, peace-loving but giving Cousin Knacki-Kurt a few liver-hooks, hospitable but prejudiced‘ Gerd has his cousin in mind, who has an eventful past and burglary career behind him and whom he employs because he was asked at a family reunion in a weak, boastful moment in front of everyone. ‚No, the Ballers don’t break up, they don’t get killed or eaten, the semi-truck takes them when they turn off or cancer takes them within a few weeks. - My daughters are Glowatzs. He pulls over, gets out and walks with the engine running to the family’s currently magenta-coloured collection mailbox, which is attached to a hot-dip galvanized pipe with two clamps and which he clears of any overgrowth from the hedge plants several times a year. He takes out the mail and stands at the open car door without remembering the walk back from the letterbox. Looking at the driveway, he sits back down in the car. ‚Soon there won’t be any tractors driving through here. Who knows what that’s good for? Who needs sea buckthorn?

On the plot, the asphalted road runs two meters below the sand and ends without a closure. From there, it curves as a sandy, percolating gravel path to the seemingly randomly arranged buildings. First comes the former stable with six guest apartments, all with a pantry and a living room. The sleeping areas are located upstairs, under the roof truss of the single-storey house. Gerd refrains from calling them ‚maisonnettes‘ for marketing purposes. Once uttered, one of his friends or neighbors might respond with „Gesundheit“, which would be nothing more than a gentle reminder to keep your feet on the ground and your head in this world before a property developer comes up with the idea of offeringtownhouses in Brunshaupten - two hundred meters from a cow pasture. The long brick building is given a small-scale structure that accompanies the viewer’s eyes, rather than imposing itself with shape instead of design. Each unit of the lined-up vacation apartments has its own entrance from outside with a cozy, dark green painted wooden door and a trellis with a rose bush next to it. There are terraces at the back. Guests prefer to sit in front of the house on the benches next to the doors because they have a view of the countryside from there. Guests‘ cars and motorcycles are parked to the side on a grassed area.

‚Everything is empty. A ‚Vacation rentals available‘ sign would be as useless as a public phone booth. Why is the damn summer too short? Every impression, the familiar and the new, provides him with material for worries and concerns. The explanatory and justifying resort to weather and climate is a reflex for farmers.

The next building, diagonally offset, eighty-four meters - Gerd had measured everything back then when building his press and bottling plant, which, contrary to his feelings, are no bigger than a few garages - further back is the family home. It consists of a main house painted pastel yellow on the uncovered walls, to which the Glowatzs added in the following decades with a seemingly untidy functionalism. From the front, the structure of the once unpretentious gabled roof house is vaguely recognizable in the middle of the complex. The main roof was adapted to the changing ground plan to form a polygonal hipped roof at the beginning of the twentieth century. For those who benefited from it, the baths business had brought in enough money to tackle projects beyond their own basic needs. The Glowatzs invested in the new building in Beach Road and an adapted roof on the courtyard. This was later followed by further extensions with needs-based transitional parts, arranged into new, almost random spatial worlds. It expands like an octopus in a strangely self-evident way that has its charm; from the air, an eye test or a hidden object picture, abandoned by the performers, comfortingly accompanied by nature. If one of Gerd’s ancestors-in-law had developed a passion for skittles, she would be standing in between; a skittle alley, built with what was available. It played a subordinate role how relaxed the time frame for procuring materials was and how many friends and acquaintances were enlisted to get hold of vehicles to transport the organized stolen material. Achieving the specifications in state-controlled production was liberated by the people from exclusively rational, irreversible facts based on physical units and mathematical quantities. Especially when processing gigantic volumes, as was and is the order of the day in the regionally present shipbuilding industry, the material quantities must be regulated over the running time, which does not necessarily mean that the delivered masses were fully reflected in the assigned workpiece. For temporal equalization, Potjomkin‘ s method of illustration was used in all phases, in different forms and interpretations.

Gerd is walking at walking pace; out of habit. In the past, there were many children on the property, his own, their friends and friends of friends. Pets and farm animals roamed freely around the farm.

 

‚Dance of death. Hanna’s chickens are down at the mill, the dog won’t leave Sandy’s side, the children are no longer playing. Neither horse nor goats, nothing. Not even Trixi is hanging around outside. What reason is there to keep all this? Gerd drives past the patchwork home on his way to the garage.

The architect’s consolation, the vegetation-rich combination of different structures and building materials, turns the house into an enchanted organism. Over the decades, roses, ivy, wild vines, clematis and all kinds of other espalier plants have created flowing transitions between the individual components and improved the thermal insulation value. In the early nineties - his wife was young but already had a boyfriend - Gerd visited the Glowatzs‘ farm for the first time. Back then, as a friend of friends, he had helped to replace all the artificial mineral fiber panels in a weekend campaign for a small fee and then watched on television for over ten years, knowing better, how meticulously the „better-westies“ carried out the asbestos removal from the Palace of the Republic before they tore it down. The heightened self-assessment unites them separately. At the end of the nineties, the building frenzy in Mill Road came to an end and the official authorities ordered a passive building freeze through a permit obligation and registration of the existing building, which, due to the size of the family, previous procedural errors and the privileged agricultural use in the outdoor area, confirmed the toleration of the result of centuries of change and the prescribed maximum sizes were cause for amusement.

Seventy meters to the right of the building and eighteen meters to the front is a red-brick shed used by the whole family as a storage room and garage. Four vehicles can easily fit next to each other and five rows in a row would be feasible. The functional building, planned as a print shop, was built in the nineteen-sixties during the heyday of spa architecture, which was characterized by Art Nouveau and Classicism. Ornaments such as shells and sea monsters are just as hard to find as columns or a balanced façade structure.

On entering the hall, the returning member gains an early overall impression of the attendance structure of their family. Everyone is of legal age and mobile. The available, privately used vehicles are parked in the garage or stop briefly, usually when unloading directly in front of the house, like the cars of visitors who asked them to park their vehicles of different colors and types in the front area of the hall in a reasonably orderly fashion so as not to give the impression of an untidy medium-sized used car dealership. Private transport is very important in the countryside. With five children’s friends visiting each other every day, an avalanche of cars drives through the village, driven by a thirst for action.

„All flown out,“ mumbles Gerd.

In summer, on a Saturday afternoon, that would be normal. In winter, it is remarkable. The region is water and beach-oriented. The icy wind is whistling there at the moment. Long walks through the meadows and woods are not everyone’s cup of tea when you’re in your early twenties, like his three eldest daughters, or just eighteen, like his twins who are in the throes of their A-levels. When they were younger, they bridged the gap by going to the movies. They exerted themselves athletically, thundering off to their friends‘ houses on their bikes, killing the day by riding. Gerd had long since stopped speculating about where each member of his family table was when. If they were younger, he would have implanted GPS trackers in them or stuck them in the soles of their shoes. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time. ‚The simplest ideas solve everyday problems. It seems to be in people to make things difficult for themselves and to complain. He would sit at home at his computer with a beer and a bag of peanut flips and see his baggage jetting around the world as colorful dots like the parcel service. Fortunately, they are all of age and able to demand a luxury that he had restricted for the last thirty years. Privacy.

‚Solitude. Free for a moment at last,‘ he says to himself tonelessly, smiling at the impending pleasure; the absence of any kind of explanation or justification and the annoyingly cosmopolitan fuss of his sister-in-law Trixi. He briefly rejoices in the peace and quiet that he otherwise had in the car. In an unfamiliar place, she scares him because she is what she says she is: a screaming nothingness. It doesn’t distract him, doesn’t cause tiny commotion on the sidelines, doesn’t take him away from himself. He plucks at the shirt over his left shoulder. There are no in-depth attempts to clarify whether it is more inherent in people to complain than to seek solutions.

A visible, for him soundless splash from a drop of clear liquid bursting on the windshield in front of him immediately attracts his receptive attention. „Nice greeting,“ says Gerd in a tone of calm disillusionment before getting out of the car. Although it’s dry outside, water makes it inside the building and collects before forming into a film of clear light refraction after it hits, without ending up forgotten in irrelevance. He casts an annoyed glance into the open roof truss made of a steel framework with wide flange profiles, which was progressive for the time and the region and type of use in the province. A whim of his wife’s ancestors who, as you can see from his sister-in-law Trixi, were and are remarkably open to new things. The entrance of the drop, which is just followed by others, is not recognizable in the dark. Gerd takes an unmotivated, investigative look at the row of carriers, under which numerous model airplanes are suspended. Each one stands for moments of joy, victory and failure spent building and flying together with his children. Gerd raises his eyebrows and removes the car key. He gets out, looks up at the ceiling again and puffs out his cheeks. When he lowers his head again, he sees his battered reflection in the dusty pane of glass in the wall to a partitioned-off adjoining room, the former model-making workshop, with its chubby cheeks. He laughs and says: „Easy, Satchmo, just do it.“ On his way out, his next glance is at the long, extendable aluminum ladder. It hangs across the wall on two hooks, over which sections of garden hose have been stretched to protect it from scratches. The room behind it is the rehearsal room for those of the family who make music. Each of the children played music - on different noise sources. The quality varied greatly, and the practicing was not blessed with strong motivation for all but Amalie and Merle, and the adult women - mother, aunt and grandmother - did not feel like praising an event that would have been better left unnoticed. Before that, domestic music had taken place everywhere but in the house. Everyone agreed on that. The rehearsal room is spacious. Instruments such as the piano and equipment such as amplifiers and a pedalboard for the electric guitar are still in there. Josephine’s drums are packed away in the corner in case she comes home. Gerd later completely soundproofed the room because Hanna claimed that the laying performance of her six hens was going down due to acoustic torture.

The front door is reached after a gently ascending path flanked by potted roses: this leads along a flower meadow that is currently all overgrown with shrubs, past parts of the house overgrown with ivy. It is a two-tone green painted door with heavy, ornate and colorful wooden ornaments and a viewing window at head height.

He opens the door, enters the hall-like corridor and places his key in the shallow metal bowl on the antique farmhouse table on the right-hand side of the wall. In front of it is the passageway to the kitchen, which can be entered from two directions thanks to an extension. There is no jingling sound when metal meets metal. The bowl, in which a cloth lies and protrudes over the edge, is otherwise empty. It is the opposite of looking at a key rack in a hotel that has not yet switched to card. No keys in the bowl mean that no one is here. From spring to fall, a vase of almost fully bloomed flowers from her property decorates the room on the table next to it. In winter, it is in a place that Gerd knows but does not associate with her. There is a single drawer under the tabletop. It contains spare keys for all the possible vehicles parked criss-cross in the ‚stable garage hall‘ in case someone is parked up. The guarantee of access through spare keys is the result of sometimes tearfully missed appointments and concerts. Mother-in-law Hanna had introduced a rule so that it could be enforced against any negligence on the part of those who were not currently interested in consistency. Even though she lives in the neighboring house, the mill on the other side, Jean parks in the shared garage. It is inconceivable that she would be parked up and unable to drive to Brunshaupten for her sundowner on the beach. She calls it a beloved habit. She started and maintained this ritual with military rigor and neurosurgical precision from time immemorial. The innovation she introduced to ensure mobility was not inconvenient for Gerd. She, his mother-in-law, who otherwise has nothing to do with software and technology in the waxed baseball cap she loves, has defined four profound - a,b,c,d - SMS codes that are supposed to trigger actions assigned to them. Given the universality of this interest, the family council has unanimously agreed for the first time, although there are draconian measures in accordance with the punishment catalog, which has also been jointly agreed. In the worst case, there is an obligation to have the cell phone permanently on reception and geolocation enabled. Two birds with one stone. Gerd and Sandy like to talk about this legendary council meeting. The children agreed wholeheartedly and did not adhere to the rules. They had overestimated the thickness of their fur. Grandma Hanna and Aunt Trixi, in complicity, took revenge by completely parking the hall themselves at the right moment and riding their bikes to Heiligendamm for dinner together with the spare keys and their cell phones switched off. Hanna’s souped-up soapbox could have been pulled out, but it was completely blocked between Trixi’s and Sandy’s cars. Chaos broke out. Sport, movies, love affairs - everything got mixed up again. Dramas of the doomed played out. Things worked better after that.

Another rule on the farm, which is unspoken and whose disregard has no consequences according to a penal code, is that if the last person is about to leave the property, they put down a note stating roughly where they think they are and whether anything has happened. This usually applied to Gerd’s wife or himself. Hanna had a hand in that too. The working mother was keen to know where her teenage daughters were. As far as she was concerned, she was of the opinion that it was nobody’s business where she was and for how long. If they want to avoid direct communication, her family uses the evening view out of the window to see her presence from the lighting. The surest indication remains Jean. If he is in the hall, Grandma, who is not a particularly pleasant passenger, is probably on the premises.

‚It says something. The note on the checkered college pad in DIN-A6 format has five words. According to the American model, the fridge, as the linchpin, visual and technical breadwinner of a family, would be predestined to present standard messages with magnetic signs, at least for children up to early puberty. There are messages that are constantly repeated. ‚I’m shopping‘ may seem as boring as it is annoying. It tempts us to fill the emotional void with overreactions: ‚Someone is doing something for the family and saying so. Does this result in an expectation? Compensatory justice? Mother’s Day? What are cell phones for when you’re looking for someone or even missing someone?‘ Magnetic signs make the obvious trivial and the special self-evident. Writing it out again and again is an expression of conscientious politeness and encouragement, not the posting of a timetable, work schedule or timetable.

„I’m shopping and at the beach.“ Sandy left this short handwritten note. The message is familiar to him and yet freshly written again. They have been married for almost twenty-seven years and nothing is the same as it was on the first day.

‚We wanted to grow old on the farm. That’s what happened. - Little slips of paper, as if everything was starting all over again with the fresh infatuation of fifth graders.

Some days, they sit next to each other on a bench like two old-timers in temperature-controlled winter storage. Other days, they discuss and argue in a struggle for power and solutions to shape the future.

‚It’s complicated. The emptiness, an expression of the fulfillment of their shared mission, should make it seem easier for Gerd to deal with rational imponderables. It is different. He floats without a solid support that would give him a foothold to distribute loads.

Gerd flips the sheet on the pad backwards, puts it in the drawer as he is at home, returns to the front door and looks out of the little window of the door towards Hollow Born. The village of Brunshaupten can be seen from the upper floor and two of the children’s rooms, but not from the entrance. That doesn’t matter. He knows where Sandy is. An air of contentment comes over him. It is the basic tone of unagitated, relieving and unburdened consternation, that feeling from which moments of happiness arise when worries - real or the difficult dialog of love and responsibility - take a moment to breathe on a warming, protective pillow and both lose weight.

‚Oh no!‘ Before he hears it, he sees a vehicle arrive through the door window, registered for a nostalgic reason. The unreliable, old, air-polluting car, the bogeyman of every sensible-minded sustainability fan, a classic car in English green, is driving towards the house with his sister-in-law at the wheel. He notices from the fluently distorted reflection of his face in the glass pane of the front door that he is letting his lower jaw hang down in mental and muscular negligence. He closes his mouth and moves into the kitchen, fumbles a glass of water out of the back of the cupboard, fills it at the sink tap, drinks in one go, sets the glass down in front of him, leans on the kitchen furniture on the side of the room and looks into the glass partition he has built. Agora - the secret main room, marketplace and courtroom, celebration and revelry, laughter and wine; a place unlike typical living rooms; a place you can visit spontaneously, but never leave in secret, with or without pretext. Overflowing with overly opulent houseplants, it connects the entrance hall, kitchen, living room and dining room. He straightens up and puts his hands in his jacket pockets. His fingertips routinely search the empty pockets. He knocks from outside, takes off his jacket as he walks, hangs it in the checkroom and disappears past the wide, glazed wooden staircase into the entrance toilet. He loves the quiet little place for a deeply trivial reason. He had installed a urinal on his own authority. This wasn’t a statement about masculine posture or positioning preferences; it was about the time spent in the bathroom and waiting times when it is used by many people. More than ten years ago, he re-tiled everything in light gray. The previous brown-beige-ochre color scheme was difficult to bear. No wet room in the Glowatzs‘ Mill Roadg home has the same quality as the bathroom in his parents‘ house. His family’s toilet in Bad Doberan is very cozy. In a wire basket next to the toilet there are numerous books in various forms, quality and condition. He had read there, smoked, thought - alone and at peace with himself, surrounded by the everyday utensils, medication and care products of the whole family. After the wedding, everything was different. Gerd became a guest in his own family bathroom and his wife waited with demands that interfered with his time and comfort. ‚Alienation begins when culture gives up on everyday life. He stands at the urinal and looks to the side at the washbasin with a goblet-like glass bowl containing fragrance samples, the pile of small towels and the white lacquered wicker basket for disposing of them after a single use. Above the washbasin, next to the mirror, the bronzed, indirect lighting, so as not to draw attention to every blemish on his face. ‚It is and remains impersonal. The basin is fantastic. Well done, Gerd. Sitting down without being allowed to read at work is enough of a curtailment of freedom. Women don’t understand us men. Although - not all of them. The Berkel at home is like it used to be. Even the mosaic tiles are brown. Nobody gets upset when they take half an hour off and the bathroom is filled with smoke after the session, which is already finding its way out from under the door. What’s the point of opening the window afterwards? Well, that’s what it’s like to crash-land in self-righteous Protestantism. Completely numb. Always thinking about the big picture and the little people fall by the wayside. Too much thinking can also be restrictive and even make you ill. The joy of life is lost at the first glance at the job description. They should think about that. I don’t know of a single saying that emphasizes the sexual attractiveness of Nobel Prize winners.

Gerd returns and waits in the conservatory for his sister-in-law - who doesn’t appear. His gaze wanders over the tropical Mediterranean botany. In the winter months, the lemons and olives suffer less than the bromeliads from the moderate temperatures of up to seventeen degrees, despite being susceptible to pests. Middle ways are compromises and never perfect. The increase in heating costs sent messages of perseverance to all tropical members of the community, while the warmth, which is also tolerable for humans in winter, sent invitations to Mediterranean plant pests. How to do it. - The next summer is quietly approaching.

‚Where is she? Typical Trixi. Nothing goes straight with her. When she goes to the bakery, she comes back with a bottle of Prosecco and has forgotten the bread rolls.

After a few minutes, he leaves, grabs his keys and jacket and strolls into the garage, where he sees his sister-in-law frantically transporting vehicle care products from the steel shelf to the car in a senseless manner and accumulation and looks at him with a blazing stare as he rushes past.

„What’s wrong with you, Trixi? Your eyes are troubled and offended like those of a bird of prey among carnivores.“

She stops, a bottle of glass cleaner in her hand, not a pile of cans, boxes, rags and tubes, pressed against her body with her forearm to stop her from falling. A strand of her long, rusty brown hair hangs in front of her eyes and mouth. The sleeve of her oversized, cream-colored hoodie has slipped over her free hand. She turns, lets everything clatter onto the shelf, straightens up, hunches over as if she has back problems, blows the strands out of sight and pulls the sleeve out in one go while fishing out a piece of kitchen paper placed behind the cuff, almost to her elbow again, knowing that all the corrective measures she has taken will not last. She blows her nose without a word, tucks the piece of short-fibered environmental sin that she has declared to be a handkerchief into her jeans and, because they are beltless, jerks them up with hip support at the back waistband, further emphasizing the white sneakers with thick soles that she wears to look three centimetres longer.

„Are you planning to polish your convertible? Spring cleaning? A marten has shat in it. I’d be happy to bring you a scented tree from the petrol station. Or would you like to replenish the hygiene products in the glove compartment?“

Gerd’s allusions are unpredictable, except for the fact that they are not of the most sensitive nature and will be of a corresponding nature. Trixi is used to it; whether she always likes it has so far only been clarified to the extent that she tolerates it, as her vocabulary allows multilingual terms and paraphrases which, coupled with biting truths, would bring her brother-in-law closer to destruction than a reference to her private sphere. Compared to the fireworks in her repertoire of destruction, this is truly marten flattery.

He once happened to be sitting in her car and, more out of boredom than anything else, had opened and demystified the storage space shrouded in mystery. Gloves were in short supply among all sorts of other utensils that provided insights into his sister-in-law’s private life and exposed her love life. Gerd knew Trixi as a fourth grader. ‚She was heart-warmingly cute with her coarsely braided pigtails‘, the hairstyle he first saw years later because she had short-cropped hair at their first chance meeting in Bad Doberan and Hanna countered an acute lice infestation at school by shaving her daughters.

‚Children,‘ muses Gerd. ‚Nobody has the slightest idea what they’ll grow up to be. The main thing is that they grow up,‘ is his conclusion, and in view of the fact that the twins are already eighteen, he can lean back in his thoughts and review the escapades and peculiarities of his sister-in-law with amusement. Trixi was always curious, had bumblebees up her butt and asked questions about the unknown. Animals, plants, people, countries - anything living or animate aroused her interest. She also had an open-minded relationship with her body early on and opted for nudism when it was no longer fashionable, even on the coast. The acquisition of land and the influx of numerous West Germans had stripped nudity of its self-image and innocence. It turned completely into the opposite: where previously a unity was created out of openness in non-statutory nakedness through renunciation, the view after the fall of the Berlin Wall turned into the wind of sublime physicality, that it was a matter of more representation if one ‚presented‘ one’s sexual characteristics uncovered, or did not cover one’s naked bottom at the minimum temperature required for nudity to avoid cooling down. During this phase of shameful Western conditioning, the adolescent Trixi came along and didn’t give a damn. There were, and still are, like-minded people of a different persuasion who dangle nudism, again not as a self-image but as a social statement. Again, there are rules that she is used to ignoring.

„Girl, why haven’t you ever joined any nudist or naturist clubs? Clothes confine you when the weather plays along.“

„Are you serious at this moment? What makes you think that? It’s March, I’m looking for chrome polish and rubber gloves. I’m fully occupied with that.“

„I’m just saying. You’ve never been in a movement. Well, you’re not in a club, a reading group or even an adult education center. Many people are currently in groups. Climate activists, women’s rights, friends of ethnic minorities, diverse sexuality, pathological helper syndrome. Something like ‚free tits!‘ or ‚aireal‘ would suit you.“

„What’s wrong with you? That’s more than just a screw that we need to talk about with you. You can’t want to compare existential and socially relevant issues with the question of whether or not my naked breasts can be a public nuisance.“

„You could then stand up for nudity and fight.“

„Do you want to get rid of me or keep me busy? The predetermined downfall of Dadaism was its manifest positioning. ‚What has a name is given a face‘ is mostly humanized in the opposite direction.“

„What?“

„Nudity is natural, the organized is unnatural. The explicit demand for the natural elevates it to something special, which means it is no longer normal. You can find a little Adorno everywhere, even on your bare bottom,“ says the former cultural studies student.

„Adorno? The brand of wine and water glasses?“

„No, the brand you’re talking about is called ... Oh my God. This is about to go to the next round. Let’s forget it, please!“

As an adolescent and young woman, Trixi was notoriously approachable. „Trixi, I ...!“; „... will politely ask for her favour, to seize an opportunity to preserve the chance of a tender tête-à-tête“ would be the long-winded, correct and harmonized arrangement of the short verse alternative hammered out in the original, which beats every form of minnesang chivalry and phrasing out of the polished armour. In terms of content, it is possibly identical. Since the age of fifteen, Trixi has had an active curiosity about the opposite sex that gives premature claims a good chance of being true. Her interests give her pleasure, which she likes to share. Unjustly, if you consider the moral component alongside the factual one, she was judged as disposable in her youth because of this. Even today, one would be wrong to assume that it is grief over the loss of her husband that is always present, but this does not lead to overcompensation.

„Who is capable of claiming that there are no blue tigers if no one blurts out their existence?“ It’s more than a motto, it’s their attitude.

Trixi loves and lives sex, regardless of whether she is clothed or naked beforehand. Her favorite hunting ground remains the beach - usually the textile beach, because it is more frequented. During her time in Luneburg, it was the Stint(fang) and Schroder Street, in Munich it was beer gardens and the Isar meadows in the English Garden, and later in New York she was in a relationship that led to a break-up through death, and from then on, regardless of her inclination, she had no interest in new, indiscriminate contacts.

Gerd sees her fidgeting and, in an act of final determination, reaches again for the glass cleaner, which he considers almost decadent as a separately listed cleaning agent, in his cosmos of experience of youthful imprinting by Fit, EMI, Spee, Pulax, vinegar and methylated spirits; do not use the latter on plastic. Then she finds the tube of chrome polish, puts the cleaner down and turns around.

„What is it?“ asks the person addressed, who sees his thoughts dancing in the sunlight like the finest dust, without being able or willing to interpret them.

„I’m thinking about you.“

„Let me know as soon as you’re smarter. Your advice, if you ever need to think about it, is always welcome. Men! I clean when one of you gets on my nerves. It’s a minor miracle that Curtisstill has paint.“

He plucks at the shirt on her left shoulder with his right hand: ‚She’s actually admirable, that girl,‘ he thinks. ‚Has fun in life, studies cultural studies in Luneburg, works in a gallery in Munich, falls in love and moves to New York with a beach house in the Hamptons; her husband cheats, speculates and kills himself, and she comes back and fights every day against something she can’t grasp and for something she doesn’t want to grasp.

He looks up: „I know!“, and leans against the Triumph Six, whose first name is the false surname of an actor. The car’s dark green paintwork is in immaculate condition. He had organized the car for her so that she could get a breath of fresh air after her crisis and actively live out a little of the extroversion that is so characteristic of her, instead of crying in the granny apartment he had built for her in the courtyard.

„Nothing witty, please. Go out into the world and saw sea buckthorn, then you’ll change your mind.“

„I like you, and what you mean is called pruning, and that’s done, and the sea buckthorn of all things would not be a distraction at the moment.“

„Forget the cozying up. I’m on Sandy’s side, whatever’s scurrying and sticking, bushwhacking or concocting in your messed-up undergrowth right now.“

‚Good girl,‘ thinks Gerd, looking into her intrinsically soft eyes, which restlessly take in their surroundings and only fleetingly register his gaze as he smiles for a moment of silence.

She smiles differently - to herself, without returning his. Four seconds of reflection pass in a noticeably slower and more pleasant way than he had hoped.

„Are you in trouble? Who’s sick? Who’s up to something? Don’t tell me it’s about your dead undergrowth?“

„Why do I seem to be the only one who thinks our problems are meaningful enough not to put on the blinkers and carry on as before? There’s nothing cute about this job. It’s not a hobby. The work on the plantations and in production feeds the family.“

„Nineteen years ago you had my full sympathy. Three small children, wife pregnant with twins, exhausted mother-in-law, difficult because selfless sister-in-law. You managed that. The girls are all grown up. Benjamin is at least of legal age. What happens today is within our comfort zone, no matter how economically dramatic it may be. We can all pitch in and pull ourselves out of it. Don’t forget the vacation apartments, and I haven’t included mum with the Beach Road and other things. It could hardly be better.“

„Put it this way.“

„How else then? Are you going to throw in the towel and flee undetected? There are no Russian tanks in your sea buckthorn fields, sorry, plantations. Not anymore or not yet.“

At that moment, Sandy rolls up in the station wagon, parks next to Curtis, gets out, goes to the open tailgate, closes it again, opens the door behind the driver’s seat and grabs a bag from the back seat. „I can’t get used to the fact that we’ve shrunk. The quantities are smaller, but I still have the old routine,“ she says and walks to the house with the shopping.

„Isn’t George with you? He’s not inside.“

„He’s with his grandma. He loves open-top driving.“

„Don’t let him get conjunctivitis, that’s not to be trifled with,“ says the cautious person.

Both women look at him without comment and Sandy makes her way to the house with the shopping.

„Aren’t you going to help her?“ asks Trixi, while Gerd looks after his wife.

He carefully rushes off to catch up with her and only grabs her boldly at the front door. Roswitha’s parcel for Sandy lies protected and frost-free in his car.